blood will always show (through)

by Anonymous

Summary:

"Not again," she grumbles, reaching up and feeling short hair ruffling over an undercut. Glancing out from the … school rooftop, Sukuna verifies the worst possible outcome: she's in modern Japan. "Fuck." 

 

A thousand years is way too long to remember a manga you read years before you died for the first time. But at least she remembers that this cotton swab bastard also dies, and that's good enough for her. Who the fuck wants to live forever anyway?

Chapter 1

Notes:

I’ve got dirty rotten energy
moments of insanity
Changing every part of me
( shedding my humanity )
Burning like an effigy
Love the way it’s taking control (x)

In the stretch of a millisecond, awareness intrudes.  

It's jarring, going from nothingness to somethingness. Unnatural. Twisting. But she is a thing , made of hatred, made of bloodlust, made of defiance. Going from nothing to danger would disorient a living creature, but as a thing awareness happens all at once. A mouth gaping open, and so out of outrage, out of defiance, she crushes it.  

You dare presume-!

It's a pathetic little thing, hardly worth her time, but that had only fed into her fury. She lands, inhaling, and takes another look around. Her senses already tell her there is no greater threat here - a sorcerer, but not one worth paying attention to - but last—

No. Last, they failed to control her, and so they began to cut.  

She lifts a hand, gazing at it. It's small, but powerful. With the blessings of her cursed energy, it's even more so: grafting claws in the place of fingernails to rip and shred. But it's only one hand. One set of arms. And this- she looks down, smoothing a hand down her front, over cotton, not hemp or silk. 

"Not again," she grumbles, reaching up and feeling short hair ruffling over an undercut. Glancing out from the … school rooftop, Sukuna verifies the worst possible outcome: she's in modern Japan. "Fuck." 

-0-

One hand slaps to her face, and it takes Sukuna a moment to realize she isn't controlling it. The amount of consternation and annoyance she's feeling right now certainly deserves a palm to the face, thus the delay.

"Hey," her mouth says. "Uh - thanks, but that's my body. I want it back."

Sukuna rolls her eyes, shoving the hand away with the one she still has control of. "Haven't you ever heard, you are what you eat, kid?" she gripes. But this - this isn't something she actually has control of, and she doesn't particularly want this body. "Anyway," she adds, turning them to look at the dark haired kid who's obviously gearing up for a fight, "the guy you saved seems to want to kill you." 

The boy's face tightens into a grimace, but his eyes are resolute. His fists are clenched together. "Don't move," he warns. "You're now a curse, so - under Jujutsu regulations, I have to exorcise you." 

"Ah, see," Sukuna sighs, her lip curling. "This is why humanity is filth."

Unfortunately, the sudden surge of hostility invokes an equal and opposite surge of alarm and rejection from Itadori Yuuji. A wave of numbness sweeps over her, like the thundering wash of a waterfall pounding down over her head. Sukuna doesn't even bother struggling. It wouldn't work, and she despises the struggles of pathetic creatures fighting their fates. 

She, more or less, has become a pathetic creature from the moment they managed to subdue her.

But well, fate is fate, perhaps. For a monster like she was, it was impossible for them to tolerate her existence. 

The skyline of modern Japan blurs into the heavy, wet darkness of her soul. For a moment, the body's shape clings to her, but as she materializes onto the surface of the blood sea, she gives a tsk and a flex of power. She spent too many years, stuck in that body back then. There was no cursed technique that could fix the horrific amalgamation that she'd been born as - clawed out of her mother as. Misshapen and deformed, a pair of twins that grew as one body, her panic and pain and fear tearing into the conjoined soul. It was just a baby, and she - well. She was born once before. Her struggles had been too damaging for a new soul. 

Now, finally, a thousand years after her death, Sukuna stares down at the reflection in the blood and finally is her instead of him.  

Not much different from Itadori, for obvious reasons. Older, as suited to her glory. Not a voluptuous body, not a seductive body, but definitely female. Still a short boy's haircut, but slightly longer on the top; she brushes it back from her face and leaves it at that. Sukuna looks up and begins strolling toward her Throne, idly giving herself a kosode, and a haori, and geta even though the blood does not wet her bare feet. 

It's almost as good, as sensual as being alive again - to appear as she should rather than as her birth had determined.

A faint chill goes up her spine, and Sukuna pauses for a moment to glance over her shoulder. Right, the cotton swab. But he's not peering into her domain, merely at it, and so Sukuna snorts, sticking her hands into her sleeves and continuing.

Skeleton hands breech the blood sea like white lotuses, and she strolls up the bone mountain, only-

A kind of weird feeling echoes through her domain, like a chipper little "Knock-knock" being called out by some overly optimistic child begging to be treated well. 

Itadori Yuuji is not an overly optimistic child, and does not beg to be treated well, it should be pointed out. He's being cute about trying to call her out to face the cotton swab, but their souls overlap. She can sense his caution, his dread. Not really aimed at her, so much as the whole situation. 

He can not actually force her to take over. The body belongs to him and so when he claims it, she can't deny him. Of course, if he's unconscious and can't argue with her, that's something else, but-

Knock-knock!

Sukuna attempts to push her soul barrier up, but - perhaps they need to coexist longer before she can manifest in small ways. It appears to be everything or nothing, for now. 

Distantly, she feels Itadori grab his face with both hands. "Whoa, he's super annoyed," he says. "Like my grandpa!"

That's just-

He's left the door open, ringing the doorbell while standing in the doorway because he hasn't yet figured out how to come down just as she hasn't figured out how to peek out. Like leaning out a window, perhaps? But it's terribly easy for Sukuna to push through and blink open Itadori's eyes. Feeling bitten fingernails sharpen into points against her face. 

Cotton swab has run off to go irritate his injured student, turning his back on Sukuna. Hostility surges, but Sukuna merely lowers her hands and folds her arms across her chest. And that sparks a writhing discontent - she spent so long in a male body that she was almost used to it, but just those scant minutes in her soul, manifested correctly, make her disgust with this body sharp and sour. 

There's a faint waft of teen-boy offense from her Vessel. 

Who should be offended here? A little boy with a bruised ego, or an ancient legend stuffed into a stinky, hormonal meatsuit? 

More offense. Didn't ask for this.

Boy, she muses, just because you didn't ask questions doesn't mean you didn't agree when you ate that.

"Haha~ you're so obedient, Su-ku-na," cotton swab head exclaims in a childish, goading voice as he appears in front of her face and pats her on the head. It's not a gentle, kind pat, but the kind of rough, flat-handed patting a child gives a dog. 

Hostility roils, her cursed energy rising hot and heavy through the air like the stench of blood and rot. "Brat," she says, cutting a glance up at his covered eyes, "say it again when I'm at full power. Right now you're just kicking a cripple. Very brave of you."

"Whoa~, touchy-touchy," he says, grinning as he leans back with both hands up. "Hey, you're a bit interesting, aren't you? You really learned about gains and losses, huh?"

Her lip curls. He's so stupid. No matter how good the records are, people have biases, and ignorances, and agendas. And a thousand years is a long time for descendants to decide what story they want history to tell. 

"You humans haven't changed a bit," she sneers - and just in time, as Itadori issues an eviction notice, booting her back into her own domain. 

What is she? A dog that plays tricks? The blood sea surges and churns, lapping at the cavern of bones, but at least it returned her where she left, and so it's very easy to take those last few steps and sit down upon her Throne. 

-0-

While Itadori Yuuji is unconscious, being transported to an empty room that gets sealed and his fate decided over a phone call, Sukuna works hard to see what she can remember of this stupid fucking story. It was super depressing, she thinks. But it's been years since she read it, and then she died and was reborn as a freak of nature, and she was well into her second life before she vaguely realized she'd been transmigrated. 

By that time, she'd basically only remembered herself and 'pink haired boy' and the funny note that the author was a bit colorblind. But given that as Sukuna, she'd had a color very near it, she's not surprised that Itadori really has pink hair. 

Now she's trying to remember… everything. She basically only knows that she had a bad end and was an unrepentant villain the whole time. Itadori tried to pull a Naruto and Sukuna had refused to be his Kyuubi. 

Of course, that Sukuna also hadn't been female, and clung enough to the female identity to make a point of it a thousand years later. Anyway, she dares anyone not to have dysphoria as a four-armed head-smashed two-dicked thing. Right, there'd been four legs, too, but one set had been so shrunken that as soon as she thought she could survive, she'd gotten them cut off.

Still almost hadn't survived. Medicine back then was lacking, and she was little more than a disgusting beast. There had been no kind, blind doctor to overlook her deformities. Only a society that had strong opinions about a whole body and countless sorcerers who frequently mistook her as a curse as it was. 

And even if they realized their mistake, they often thought death would be a kindness. 

Filthy wretched creatures. 

So now what? She only remembers the source material being a situation of a lot of good characters being killed off. It was that kind of dark and gritty setting. She… she doesn't really care about them anymore. Doesn't remember their faces, their stories, their names. 

Seeing cotton swab man stirred up a bit more forgotten information. Mostly that he had a bad end, too. Remembering that had helped her keep her temper with his stupid kiddy goading bullshit. For all his confidence and god complex, he hadn't escaped, either. A kind of schadenfreude. 

But good for Itadori. He survives. Her twin lived a long life this time around, even if it was kind of fucked up because his son had… uh, concerning tastes in women, or at least a weird enough fixation on one that he overlooked all of brain-case's weirdness. 

Good enough, probably, she thinks. 

Annoying eyeball brat dies, she can die for the third time, and her quasi-nephew can live.

-0-

Notes:

Literally no one has noticed Sukuna is actually female because Itadori hasn't gone into her innate domain and when manifesting through Yuuji she looks male. When she speaks through Yuuji's cheek, however--

Chapter 2

Being a Vessel is really weird, Yuuji thinks. It feels a little like constantly having indigestion, or heartburn, or something. Although he hasn't experienced any of those, but he imagines it feels like this. Something not-heat sitting in a ball at the bottom of his throat, deep inside his chest where it would empty into his stomach. A weird space where the bitter, soapy taste of Sukuna's fingers just… disappear. 

Like he has a second stomach or something. 

He's kind of glad that ancient corpse-fingers aren't sitting in his real stomach, actually. Eating fingers is gross enough, the thought of them sitting around in stomach acid, being dissolved is… ugh.  

So yeah, he's got some kind of second stomach where Sukuna is hanging out, being fairly quiet. If he wants, he thinks of… gagging, a little bit: stuffing his finger into the back of his throat to force himself to vomit, and that allows Sukuna to take over his body.

It's really unpleasant, not the least of which because he's… kind not aware when it happens. Not like the first time, when Sukuna killed that curse; he was aware for that. But the second time, when he let Sukuna take over like that Gojo guy asked, there hadn't been much of anything. A lot of weird feedback, but basically he's just floating in a white nothingness with nothing to occupy himself except for what amounts to hearing a radio from three rooms over. 

Coming back to his body is always a bit weirder. It isn't like someone borrowing a shirt, and stretching it out so that it no longer feels right, but that there is always this strange prickling throughout his whole body. A bit like when his arm falls asleep. 

The second finger he ate… he can feel the difference, somehow. If the first finger had just been a vague weight in his chest, the second finger that let him pinpoint the second stomach also lent a heft to it, that turned it into that weird not-heat. It sits somewhere behind his ribcage, a step to the right of his heart. 

A faint sensation of… something. 

A constant, low-grade fever accompanied by nausea, churning and twisting, though higher than his gut. Yuuji imagines this is what it must feel like to live next door to a domestic violence couple, but it does no good to call the cops because neither of them are striking open skin. Just yelling and throwing things at one another at all hours of the day and night. 

Yuuji is washing his hands in the bathroom when it feels like the domestic violence couple get their shit together to pretend to be normal as they leave for work. His eyes flick up to the mirror, startled, and then he stares in vague alarm as a second pair of eyes have opened up on his cheekbones.  

He kind of freezes in place, waiting to see what's happening. They're red eyes, and somehow he understands instantly that this is Sukuna. Is he - is he taking over? Yuuji immediately tries that weird not-swallowing thing he did to snatch his body back before, but nothing happens.

Except that the eyes roll. 

"Vessels have openings, idiot," a miniature mouth opens on his cheek to say. 

Yuuji feels like gagging a little bit. Where the hell is that? He turns his head to get a better look at the fully formed mouth on his face, poking his tongue into his cheek. There's nothing there! Where the hell are the teeth and tongue fitting in when it's just his cheek on the inside?!

"Bleh," Yuuji says, sticking his tongue out and then moving his face around. "Whoa, how are you doing that? You don't - that's not my throat! How can you speak without a throat?"

Sukuna's eyes do an amazing job at communicating how idiotic he finds Yuuji, despite not having eyebrows and also his eyes being a funny shape the way they're curved around his eye. 

Come on, it's a valid question, isn't it!

"I can incarnate after a thousand years," Sukuna says flatly, "manifesting a mouth is the least of my skills." It's even weirder that the… tiny not-face on Yuuji's face can have such a deep voice, although… something's weird about it. Yuuji turns his head even further, although it's hard to see out of the corner of his eye that way. 

"Oh yeah? It's kind of a weird skill to have," Yuuji says. "Did you not have one before?" 

Sukuna doesn't seem very impressed, but he doesn't seem to like… try to do anything about it, like take over Yuuji's body or anything. Not even when Yuuji ate the other finger, although he'd definitely felt the influx of power. 

"You'll find that I had two of everything," Sukuna says.

Yuuji is a normal teenage boy, so he immediately leaps to the obvious thing. "Whoa!" he gasps in a mixture of awe and envy. "Even-?"

Sukuna's eyes squint, somehow managing to look down his nose at Yuuji, despite not having one. But he still says, "yes, even that." 

Yuuji solemnly folds his hands together in a martial arts salute while bowing his head. Even though the absurdity of the fact that he's talking about dicks with an ancient spirit is making him a little dizzy so that he kind of wants to burst into laughter. But uhh, he also kind of doesn't want to offend Sukuna? And laughing might do that. He might take it wrong.

Nothing he's found out about Sukuna has really inclined Yuuji to respect him in the least, honestly. But somehow, he's come to the conclusion that there's no point in starting a fight with the spirit, thing, whatever, that's stuck in his body with him. Let's be good roommates, he imagines saying brightly. 

Nah. Maybe not that far. 

" Master, " he says, striking a pose, "if you know how to duplicate mouths, then could you teach me?!"

"With just your pathetic skills at sorcery?" Sukuna sneers. "Don't make me laugh. Modifying the body is a dangerous path."

"But don't you miss it?" Yuuji badgers. "Why don't I let you come out to give it a try?"

Sukuna looks like he regrets ever showing up to talk to Yuuji, which is a shame, because Yuuji really might actually go through with his offer just then. Sadly, that's also when Fushiguro comes looking to find out what's taking Yuuji so long in the bathroom, and Sukuna vanishes off his face. 

It's really weird that the moment the mouth and eyes closed, there's nothing to prove that they had been there. They'd had depth, and wetness. And Sukuna talking to him despite only one throat between them, and a voice that Yuuji could never make on his own. It's deeper, for one. A little rougher. But there's a very strange quality to it? He really doesn't know how to describe it. 

"Hey, Fushiguro," Yuuji says, "at what level do you start learning how to change the body?"

Fushiguro pauses, turning to frown at him. It's almost like the guy has a resting bitch face or whatever, except that's not it either. He only frowns when talking, but it's the frown Yuuji does when he's having to study, really. "Change the… what are you talking about?"

"You know," Yuuji says. "Like what if I want to grow an ear on my neck, or something." 

Fushiguro judges him pretty harshly for that example. "You don't? Other than using Reversed Curse technique, any techniques that alter the body have been outlawed."

"Ha? Really?" 

Yuuji slumps in disappointment, although he's not altogether surprised. He's sure that Sukuna using it is probably involved in that decision- 

In that pit of his chest, the domestic violence couple start up again. It sounds less violence-y, and more mocking, though. Not in the - not in the immature, hurtful way that kids his age do, but the way some of his teachers do when he says something stupid, if mostly on purpose. 

That adult 'jeez, you don't understand anything' way. 

Yuuji really hates that.

Not the mockery, but what it implies.

"Where did you even hear about that?" Fushiguro wants to know. 

Yuuji tilts his head the way he knows makes him look particularly ditzy. "Well, uhh… since this guy is incarnating through me," he says, poking his finger into his chest, "I kinda worried… what if I grow those extra fingers I ate."

Fushiguro stares at him in a kind of exhausted way. It's probably the exhaustion that makes him say, "that would be fucked up."

"It would be fucked up," Yuuji agrees. 

"... I don't think cursed objects work that way," he adds. He doesn't seem certain, though. 

Great, now Yuuji really does actually have to worry about this! Wasn't Fushiguro sent after the finger for a reason! Shouldn't he be an expert! But he's Yuuji's age, he can't be an expert, right?? They sent a teenager to do a man's job! Yuuji needs an adult!! 

"Yo," Gojo says, appearing.

Not that one!!

-0-

Alright, to be frank, Yuuji actually likes this weird Gojo guy. Sure, he showed up too late to save anyone, and Yuuji has had a lot of Thoughts about Fushiguro being the one sent to fetch Sukuna's Finger, and he's just kind of unsettling looking in general, like… the story of ghosts trying to look human, but not quite doing it right. And he likes antagonizing the ancient spirit 'incarnating' in Yuuji's body or whatever—

He actually seems really unreliable!?

No wonder this isn't the adult that Yuuji wants!

Notes:

Yuuji: Whoa~ how are you talking without a throat??
Sukuna: First of all, through cursed energy all things are possible, so jot that down

Sukuna: Now, how do I bond with my nephew?
Sukuna: Ah, right, dicks. Teenage boys love dicks.

A character that is Innately Good is boring compared to a character that leans into their 'good' personality traits and Chooses to be Good.

This chapter takes place between Yuuji doing funeral rites (which is after the sealed room) and them arriving at Tokyo. Due to the timing, the first chapter has been (slightly) revised to reflect that. I'm working hard to have less narrative/exposition instead of dialog, wish me luck.

Chapter 3

Unfortunately for Sukuna, Itadori does not lay the topic of bodily transformation to rest, and now that she's opened a line of communication, Itadori seems determined to use it. Fortunately, he does take her cue and knows better than to try conversing with her in front of his two sorcerer companions. Unfortunately, en route to Tokyo and Jujutsu High, the only privacy he has is the bathroom. 

This is Sukuna's life now. Being badgered by minors in a public bathroom about dicks. 

Still, she prefers this topic to being subjected to a 'power of friendship' attempt, or discussing her past misadventures. It's also better than sitting around in her domain, utterly without any sort of entertainment other than her own thoughts. 

Speaking of bodily transformations, the form she initially chose is still not right. No matter how wrong the previous one was, she lived in it for almost fifty years. She's gotten used to having four arms and an extra mouth. It's just clothing that remains her biggest issue. Back then, not only was she half again larger than the largest adult man, but there were no clothes suited for a four armed form. 

At best, she could wear a large kimono as an open coat - and often did, amongst those who were either too frightened of her to fight, or those who had never seen her as something to fight. 

Now that she has breasts, though, she is no longer willing to be topless.  

It isn't entirely because she's coming to understand the full repercussions of having a teenage boy as her Vessel. It certainly isn't modesty; back then, she had only been so hellbent on having pants because having those things flopping about was intolerable. The people back then hadn't been like fainting Victorians, but nudity out of appropriate context was still a big deal. Even if she'd gotten similar reactions to Itadori's in the onsen. 

Unfortunately, in return, idiots somehow got the idea of sacrificing women to her, and that- 

Well, often, Sukuna had let the other shoe fall. She was treated as a beast, and so she acted as a beast. If she was treated as a demon to make sacrifices to, then she embraced life as a demon. If she ate people rather than rape them, then that only made her more of a devil than they expected. 

If Itadori Yuuji keeps opening the door and rapidly punching the doorbell, teasing her about seizing the body so she can perform human transmutation—

"It's like you're trying to get yourself killed," Sukuna says, metaphorically cracking open the window and peering at him through the mirror. "That cotton swab earned you a stay of execution, but if I start changing your body at two fingers, no one will tolerate it. And no matter how strong he is, he's only one man. He has to sleep sometime." 

Yuuji gives her a dumb cow-eyed blink. "But… what if I keep it secret?"

"Boy, unless you think you're never going to be injured, forget it," she says, unimpressed. "And you will get injured, because other curses will want my fingers, and you'll have to fight them for it. Not every finger will be convenient, like the one at your school, or the one that cotton swab found for you." 

He sags with disappointment. "Aw." After a second, he perks up. "Hey, is that Gojo guy really all that strong? You didn't seem to want to fight him, but also - how do I put it? He seems to try kind of hard not to break things?" 

Only a curse of her caliber could probably tell how dangerous that cotton swab was. Or apparently a little brat with superhuman strength who knows what trying not to break things looks like. 

Reasonably speaking, Cotton Swab should have a killer Heavenly Restriction - but the absence of something is much more difficult to see than the presence of something. And even if most of Cotton Swab's cursed energy is pocketed away in the space between the particles of the universe, Sukuna has four eyes. Even if they don't work like his inherited power, she can see enough. 

"Not bad," she says neutrally. "He'll probably tell you he could win." 

Itadori stills, his guileless brown eyes meeting hers in the mirror. She can tell he hears what she isn't saying. 

-0-

Ironically, not an hour later, the cotton swab says exactly that.

-0-

While the principal of the school works hard to give Itadori a more concrete belief than just trying to abide by a dead guy's wishes, Sukuna works on her form a bit. Only partially Incarnated as she is, her form will always be somewhat shaped by the Vessel - even if Itadori is a Cage more than a Vessel. Wasuke's karma must have been abysmal, she thinks while the blood sea writhes below. 

The doorbell starts ringing again, and Sukuna drops her hand, casually folding her lowest set of arms around her ribs while the higher set rests her hands on her hips. Ah, apparently Cotton Swab took Yuuji to the dorms, and the sudden flare of her cursed energy alerted the hairy brat.

"How am I supposed to sleep when that happens?" he's demanding crankily. For his part, Cotton Swab seems a little surprised, too. 

"What~ Yuuji, does Sukuna hate the idea of gathering his fingers up?" he asks with a tight little smile, as much threat as it is a goad. 

Sukuna could manifest on Itadori's face, but she's really not in the mood. "Tell him not everything is about him," she snorts, picking up her haori. She'd ended up cutting slits in her kosode for her lower arms, but since the haori hangs open, she doesn't have to worry about it getting in the way. 

"Aw," Itadori says, pinching his own cheek and pulling it. "But I don't wanna play telephone…"

Cotton Swab arches his brows. "Oh, is Sukuna talking to you?" 

Sukuna faintly gets the impression from Itadori that he doesn't feel tricked at all by that question; they both suspect that guy knew it a while ago. Itadori still snaps to attention, nodding with an 'un, un!' "Sensei, Sukuna said he wasn't paying attention to you at all!"

Now it sounds like a tsundere denial, although only she and Cotton Swab seem to hear that. The hairy brat just looks a little stressed by the idea that Sukuna had the capacity to pay attention to the outside world. Little bastard. If she didn't, wouldn't she focus her entire attention on hassling Itadori? Wouldn't that damn that kid rather badly? 

"Um, but, Sukuna," Itadori says, " can you do a radar and locate your fingers?" 

Cotton Swab seems especially entertained by this question, mostly due to Itadori still tugging on his own cheek. Ah. It's likely he can tell that Sukuna's cursed energy is rather strong at that point and is drawing some conclusions. 

"You don't have to worry about that," she says dryly. 

Since she's in this situation, it's almost certain that brain-case is involved. Given what she knows from the Story, and the fact that a finger showed up at Itadori's school, that brain-case definitely doesn't understand 'no'. So even if Itadori had been chained up in the basement of that school, they would have found a way to deliver her fingers to him. 

"Huh?" 

"What is it?" Cotton Swab wants to know. 

Itadori thinks about it for a moment, then admits, "Sukuna said not to worry, and it felt like… you know when you're stressing about the results of a test to your teacher, and they already know you passed, so they say that? Only… in a bad way."

The hairy brat seems somewhat horrified. "You… you can tell that?" he asks. 

"Yeah. It's kind of like hearing an argument next door," Itadori says cheerfully enough. 

"Well, your souls are occupying the same space, so that's not entirely surprising," Cotton Swab says. 

"Whoa! You can tell that?" 

Cotton Swab grins. "It's something of a special skill! Don't worry too much. Sorcerers can normally only sense cursed energy, and yours should feel different from Sukuna's." 

"What a relief!" 

Sukuna withdraws her attention as the conversation moves on to picking up the third classmate. Itadori would have to do some horrific things before his cursed energy would be anything at all like hers. Given how prolific she had been, unless he engaged in non stop terrorism for a decade or two, he wasn't catching up. 

Reaching down, Sukuna idly strokes her grumbling belly, making sure that unruly mouth isn't drooling. It'd be great to decimate something like a city block. Or a sorcerer clan. Too bad there are no longer any warlords around. In a pinch, their armies are great for this kind of thing.

-0-

For Itadori Yuuji, the next several days are a sweet slice of life Story as he and his new classmate settle in and cope with the peculiarities of jujutsu sorcerer school life. 

It's a bit different for Sukuna in her innate domain. Nothing that happens in class is interesting enough for her, who graduated from high school a lifetime ago, and lived for a decade as the King of Curses. Instead, Sukuna redecorates.

In a manner of speaking, anyway.

It's an unpleasant process, but a vital one. A mixture of apathy and hubris landed her in this situation, and her pride can not tolerate the thought of falling twice to the same flaws. It's the same thing that makes her want to kick Cotton Swab around, although being an incarnation with only a tenth of her power makes that unlikely.

It will have to wait until her Vessel has absorbed a few more fingers. She'll sooner have unfettered access to Itadori, so she'll have to make do. 

Initially, she'd been a little interested in kicking the brat around a bit and toughening him up. She forgot, but after seeing him, she remembered that the boy was always one step behind, struggling and always getting hurt before desperately learning a curse technique to help him out. 

That brief touch of goodwill has long since passed. Now she just wants to give him a beating. 

"Hey, Sukuna, tell me a bedtime story!" Every night! Despite ignoring him! 

This is probably the karma she earned. 

"Boy," she says at last, "I don't have any bedtime stories."

"But you're really famous," he says, folding his hands across his stomach while he stares up at the ceiling. "Surely there's something you can say!"

"I could say a lot," she says dryly. "If you wanted to have nightmares. You modern sorcerers call it the Golden Age, but that's just because curse spirits were rioting. Knowing what you do of how they're formed, what do you think caused so many?"

That stumps him for a moment. She's certain someone has explained to him how curses exist, but… probably he never thought of it in depth. He's a child. They have to be taught to think beyond their immediate circumstances. Wasuke did good raising him, but… probably, Wasuke thought he'd have more time or just hoped the world of jujutsu wouldn't catch up with him. 

"The clans were also reproducing like crazy, since women were pretty disposable back then," she adds. "So, if you want to call that the 'Golden Age' or whatever - heh, it's hard to say golden for who." 

There's that faint echo of a quiet dread. Itadori compartmentalizes like crazy, it seems. "So what," he says, "you're advocating for women's rights? That's really forward thinking of you!"

"It was annoying looking at curses about dying in childbirth and fear of sex," she says irritably. "Though I'm fairly certain that curse the nail girl destroyed was created by some men's hatred of women." 

Itadori's sudden dip into trepidation suddenly sweeps up. "Haha, really! I'll have to tell her, she'd love that!" 

Buoyed, Itadori carries on for a few minutes longer about his classmates before quieting down once more. She warned him off her stories, but she also said enough for his thoughts to start taking darker turns. 

"So that building that sensei took me and Kugisaki to," Itadori says, "that's… pretty normal?"

Sukuna had barely paid attention, not only because the curses were so weak, but also because her Vessel had never felt threatened. There's still enough of an impression that she says, "those weaklings? Yes. In my day, one in every three buildings would have curses like those." 

"But why?" he asks. "They - they were weak, right? Were there not enough tools?" 

"There were thriving smiths back then," Sukuna drawls, her constant simmering rage bubbling. She peels her lip back from her teeth. "And the weapons had to be quenched, did they not? But there was little support for it. Boy, ask your teacher what the real cause of the Clans banding together and creating a so-called neutral institution like a school to organize the hunting of curses. I doubt he can truthfully say that it's altruism."

Something crashes against the other side of the bedroom wall. Apparently they woke up the hairy brat.

The rage recedes like the tide, never gone, never far; she tucks it up under her ribs where it belongs. Itadori sits up briefly, turning to call a sorry to his classmate. Then he just continues sitting there for a moment, feeling heavy. 

He's just a kid, fifteen years of age. He hadn't had time to figure out who he is and what the world is like and what he's going to do about it, yet. The modern age is so slow and so soft, Sukuna thinks. Children were eaten by the thousands by cursed spirits, to the point they had little songs to warn each other away from danger, and those Clan sorcerers barely blinked when they saw it happening, and always, always: looked away. 

Her Vessel is at their nonexistent mercy, and Gojo Satoru is one man; human, for all that he has the power of a god. Sukuna herself had been more or less a god incarnate back then, and she still lost. Enough ants can kill any elephant. 

Although the world is heavy, and the things living on it are filthy, with enough strength one can survive. And knowledge is nearly as powerful as cursed energy. 

-0-

Unfortunately, Itadori doesn't have a chance to follow up on Sukuna's words, as the next day the Cotton Swab is hustled off on some kind of business trip. And then the children are sent on a mission. 

Two fingers, plus her remodeling, Sukuna thinks as she slouches on her Throne, lips peeled back in something like a grin, something like a snarl. Time for her nephew to learn a filthy lesson.

Notes:

Sukuna: in the heian era, life was SHIT
Sukuna: then I incarnated here, and it is also SHIT
Yuuji: whoa!
Gojo, listening in: HMM it's probably bad I'm agreeing with Sukuna

-at night-
Yuuji: it's the POWER OF FRIENDSHIP
Sukuna, cursed energy flaring: are you kiDDING ME--
-next door-
Megumi, face down in his pillow: i fucking hate this family

Sukuna still hasn't remembered how and who killed Gojo lol, in case anyone was wondering how much of the plot she knows. She also doesn't remember the detention center arc, she just immediately assumes the worst.
I actually like Gojo, but having the POV characters mocking him is funny.

I know OG!Sukuna suspected that Jin was his twin, but I'm pretty sure I heard that Gege said it was Wasuke?? If I'm wrong, someone correct me on that, since it keeps coming up in this fic.

Friendly reminder, Sukuna is going to do Yuuji a Trauma next chapter :V

Chapter 4

Summary:

to forge something, first it must break

Your name is Itadori Yuuji, and you were born for a terrible purpose.

You don't remember how you know this. You only know that when you were young, one of your classmates cheerfully echoed their parents, saying "I'm proof of their love!" And you were overcome by a sickening jealousy. 

Grandpa doesn't like talking about your parents. When you go home and ask him if you are proof of their love, he makes a hideous face. 

You don't ask about your parents again.

Grandpa tries to make up for it, but you think he also knows you were born for the wrong reasons. It gets easier over the years, though. Grandpa teaches you how to be a normal person, even if you are terrible and too strong and it's easy to hurt the other children.

You have to move to the city because you kept breaking their arms by accident.

Well, not by accident. On purpose. It's just that it takes so long for their arms to be fixed, long after you stop meaning it, which is kind of like by accident, right?

Anyway, you learn not to break things anymore. Grandpa starts loving you, and that helps, actually. That steady knowing you have gets quieter and quieter as you grow older. You never exactly forget that you were born for a terrible purpose, but it stops defining you. And then—

And then your Purpose arrives. 

-0-

Yuuji totally understands where Fushiguro is coming from when he doesn't want to take Tadashi's body with them, or come back for it. He does. He really, really does. They're in a very dangerous situation, although Yuuji thinks it's a little messed up that the guy who is managing them acknowledges that Gojo-sensei should be here and then… just expects the three of them to take care of it anyway.

For real. Fushiguro isn't half bad, but the situation with Sukuna's finger got so bad that Yuuji had to eat it. Kugisaki isn't bad, but just two weeks ago, she was stuck between a rock and a hard place by a curse that Yuuji later finds out was just a low Grade 3, just because it was a little smart. 

So yeah. Yuuji understands this probably isn't the time to worry about bringing out the dead when they still haven't checked on the womb yet, but what's killing him is that Fushiguro isn't hearing him.  

Even if it's hard, even if it's dangerous, even if it's the wrong time— but there isn't a 'wrong time' for them to act like other people matter.

Taking the first step down that path absolutely can not happen.

It can never be their place to judge who is worthy of rescue.

And it's too late for Tadashi, but what about his mother?

Don't her feelings count?

So yeah, Yuuji gets into a big blowout fight with Fushiguro at a bad time because Yuuji can't be a person who decides who is worth saving, and he doesn't want Fushiguro to become that person either.

Yuuji is definitely not worth more than anyone else. If he is brave, if he is righteous… well, Yuuji doesn't think he's any of those things, he just wants his Grandpa to be proud of him. Or well: he wants to be a person his Grandpa could be proud of. You know. 

Because Grandpa won't be proud of anyone anymore. 

Here's the other thing that Yuuji knows: Fushiguro and Kugisaki have already almost died to other curses, but Yuuji has the King inside him.

Sukuna is not a good person. Yuuji kinda feels like it would be impossible for him to be, though, especially after their talk just last night.

But that's okay. Sukuna hates being looked down upon the most.

Yuuji is really good at getting looked down at.

-0-

Yuuji has never seen a cursed spirit until that night at the school. It's possible that he couldn't see them, until the searing, abrasive aura of Sukuna's finger washed over him while he stood alone in the street. A mere finger, from so far away, had impressed the Knowledge of Death upon him. Fingers shaking, sweat chilling his skin, breaths coming in shallow little gasps as his heart raced frantically. 

He had never felt that fear before. It's never been something he'd had to face. For someone like him, born the way he is, he rarely gets hurt.

A few times, out of curiosity, he'd pressed his body as hard as he could. But that kind of sweating, that kind of exertion, his breath coming fast and his heart pounding… it's different. It's powerful.

The feeling of fear is a weak, fluttering thing. A moth frantically hitting the wall of a glass jar. The desperate scurry of a bug upon which light has shone. The frantic flap of paper before it catches flame. 

He can not quite grasp it, even as his body trembled. 

After swallowing Sukuna's finger, the second one fails to impact him as strongly. Gojo-sensei says it's because of an equalization of pressure - a single finger can no longer impact him because he's constantly sharing space with one. Now he shares that pressure with two. 

It's probably… overconfidence. 

Yuuji has lived his whole life being so much stronger than the people around him, even the adults, even when he was five, that very little can threaten him. Then he's introduced to the world of jujutsu and, understandably, prioritizes Sukuna's fingers as more dangerous than a Grade Two curse. Then he possess two fingers, and any curse he meets is much, much weaker than that. 

So, Yuuji thinks: I can rescue them. So, when the Cursed Womb threatens to be a Special Grade, Yuuji knows his two classmates are in danger, but still thinks: I can help them. The Curse splits them up, which must mean that they're dangerous, right? It has to make them weaker, right. It's probably quick, the way it killed Fushiguro's Divine Dog, but as long as he and Fushiguro work together— 

But the first time Yuuji comes face-to-face with Sukuna's finger that has already been eaten by a Cursed Spirit, he realizes that the ambient cruelty of a dead thing is something completely different in the hands of a monster born to use it. 

He and Fushiguro stand there frozen still, like butterflies pinned to cork board. 

It's terrible. Pinching butterflies by their wings, the colorful scales grinding to gray dust, the legs wiggling and grabbing in a helpless struggle. Death beats down, and some animal instinct begs Yuuji to stay in place as if never moving can stretch this moment of not being dead into eternity. 

If Yuuji is so, then for Fushiguro—

And so Yuuji tries. Just as he did before, he determines that the Fear is pointless, useless, and so he forces it down like swallowing Sukuna's finger. He grabs his weapon and slices-

Is. Sliced. 

The weightlessness, and the weird sensation of draining flows up his arm for several moments before the pain of his hand being removed at the wrist registers. Cold slaps his face, a terrible wet chill flushing down his neck and spine. He glances back and sees that the knife has shattered.

Now what? He needs cursed energy to fight a curse. What's he supposed to do? How can he help anything like this?!

"Sukuna," Yuuji shouts. 

As usual, there's a strange burn like when he almost throws up, but the bile never reaches his mouth. Only it's cursed energy in this case, probably, bubbling up from that second stomach of his. 

"Oh?" Sukuna utters aloud from his cheek, disinterested, "what is it?" 

It takes Yuuji a moment to answer, distracted as he is with trying to apply emergency first aid to his - to his stump. He feels a little dizzy, so the blood loss has to stop, and the only tourniquet he can create is with his belt. Fushiguro is edging back from the Cursed Spirit, trying not to trigger an attack but also keep its attention. 

"Let me borrow your power," Yuuji says, biting down on the belt to pull it tight.

Sukuna chuckles. "Borrow my power, is it," he drawls. "Why should I? Do you think our relationship is so good I'll become a tool in your hand?" The light, mocking tone drops into sheer, malicious loathing: "Don't make me laugh. "

Yuuji's eyes water as he yanks the belt tight, setting it in place. It hurts! It really hurts. He's felt a little pain before, like bumps and scrapes, but - not like this. Not losing an entire hand so that the whole arm burns, nerves screaming. 

How much worse will it be when his execution happens?

Right, his execution. All along, they meant to kill him. And Gojo-sensei got him a stay, but that's not a pardon, is it? That's just putting it off. How can he help other people if they kill him? 

Stop, he thinks, swallowing it down. It's not helpful right now. Forget about it. 

"Fushiguro," he says, feels a little like he's choking around something. "You should run away! Find Kugisaki and get out of here! I'll keep this thing distracted." 

"Keep it distracted how?" Fushiguro demands, wild eyed. "That isn't going to help you!" 

Sukuna sneers at him from Yuuji's cheek. 

"What does it matter," Yuuji says, gulping his breaths in. "If Sukuna doesn't want to die with me, then he'll have to help, one way or another." 

Fushiguro meets his eyes for a moment, scared and unwilling, but—

At last, he agrees. He, too, knows how hopeless this situation is. He doesn't want to die and doesn't want Yuuji to die, but they both know… they both know it, after all. And anyway, Yuuji doesn't really believe that Sukuna won't do anything. From the beginning, Sukuna was the one who reached out to him. Sukuna doesn't want to hasten his execution, even if it's just to try finding another, better Vessel that can't fight back. 

As Yuuji is blown back, as his fingers grind into blood mist against the cursed barrier, Yuuji bites his lips bloodied before he manages to say, "okay! Then how do you do it not as a tool?!"

"Well," Sukuna says, his leisurely tone dropping low into a faint sing-song, "there's a little thing called a 'binding vow', you see." 

-0-

Sukuna closes her eyes, yawning as she slumps upon her Throne. When she'd sensed one of her Fingers here, she'd had an idea about how this would go. Those Clan sorcerers are always so impatient, she thinks. They always have to rush ahead, so assured in their conceit. 

Or maybe led by the nose. 

When she'd laid eyes on the Cursed Spirit that was feeding off her Finger, she'd faintly remembered more of the Story. That's right - the Original Sukuna had somehow seized Itadori's body, and later ripped his heart out. And… something. She thinks it made the fandom ship the OG!Sukuna with that hedgehog's dilemma boy. 

Didn't he end up being another possible Vessel? 

Well, whatever, she thinks, directing another outward pulse of Reversed Cursed Energy into her current Vessel. She has no interest in abandoning her current Vessel for that one. No one would take that lying down, least of all Cotton Swab, and while Sukuna wants to kick his ass, she's not stupid enough to have their motivations so mismatched while doing it. 

Back then, there was a Limitless user before the Six-eyes that guarded the Star Plasma Vessel, and that woman had a bad enough temper that even unable to perfect her Limitless, she'd made a big mess of things. 

Honestly, Sukuna thought it was all great fun, even if it was over those Zenin bastards murdering that Sugawara daughter's intended marriage partner. That woman had even crippled their proudest sons before accepting censure and being put to death to avoid a whole sorcerer war breaking out. 

It was honestly in her memory that Sukuna had helped that braided bastard out. 

"On your feet," Sukuna utters, her secondary eyes on her Vessel. "You want to save people with just this little strength? You can't even save yourself."

Itadori gasps, blood and tears dribbling onto the concrete between hands that bite into it. He chokes, body trembling, heart thundering a panicked, painful staccato. "I can't do it," he sobs. "I can't - I can't… I can't do this." He crumbles, curling forward as the Curse approaches. 

Sukuna purses her mouth, second eyes narrowing while her primary eyes slit open. It's been… seventeen minutes, hasn't it? Relentlessly healing his wounds while he flings a body made of flesh and bone against the Cursed Spirit powered by her Finger? Well, with that sheering, abrasive power, the energy barrier it put up acts a lot like her Shrine. Like throwing a calf before a wall of bristling spears and stomping soldiers.

He has no weapon, and she gave him none. The vow only allowed her to use his body as a conduit - a step up from where she'd been permanently imprisoned, able to flare her energy like a signal fire to any sorcerer with any scrap of talent, or manifest a mouth through the 'opening' of the Vessel, but unable to do more than that. It's not a terribly useful ability, other than the fact that it has given her greater access to his body. 

She could have given him claws with which to rend and tear. 

But the little shit dared to presume to use her as a tool. 

"Aren't you just a distraction? Didn't you think to go ahead and die?" Sukuna asks, eyes falling shut as she shifts on her Throne. "What's the problem now? Isn't this what you intended?" 

He sobs, and flinches as he suddenly senses the Curse approaching. Doesn't dare to look, wobbling and shaking as he forces fear-locked joints to move, falling over onto his hip as he kicks at the floor, pushing himself away. 

"Didn't you sacrifice your own life for your comrades?" Sukuna asks, shaking her foot. "Is this how they should remember you?"

The breath sounds punched out of him, wheezing, red-stained liquid spattering on the concrete floor. 

"Itadori Yuuji," she says, rolling the pads of her fingers together, "Do you want to die on your back like a dog, or die on your feet as a man?"

He sucks in a breath. His limbs shake. He gets his feet beneath him. His back straightens. His fists clench, and then he raises them and lifts his head. 

Her eyes open. 

That's right, he thinks, so firm that it resonates straight into her domain. If I can't die a natural death, then at least I die as a human being!

Instead of becoming a curse - I'll let it all out, just like this!

Unfortunately for Itadori, that's when the Cursed Spirit puts its fist through his chest. 

-0-

Sukuna stands from her Throne, stepping down the stairs built from the backs of her enemies. Itadori Yuuji lays half-sunk into the blood sea, face down and unmoving as the still surface laps only gently against his fallen form. She leans down, her lower arms extending to turn him over and scoop him up.

One free hand reaches out to wipe the blood from his peaceful face as she turns to head back to the bone mountain. The other smooths the wet hair from his face. 

"Not bad," she says, gazing down at him as his eyelids begin to flicker. "You bent. You were not broken."

Her cursed energy maintains the broken form of the Vessel, though here in the metaphysical space of her soul, no time passes at all. Itadori stiffens, jolting, his soul remembering the agonizing pain of the last twenty minutes of his life, even as the lack of it shocks more tears into his eyes. He sucks desperate, broken breaths, tears rolling thick and freely down his face, into his hair. She holds him down in the cradle of her arms until he stills, gasping, staring up at her without comprehension. 

"Isn't it just dying?" Sukuna asks him. "And so what? Is it terrible? Then become stronger. Is it unjust? So what. Only the strong have the right to speak."

Bending down, she sets him on the bottom stair, and straightens to observe him emotionlessly. "Since you don't have the ability to win your own battles, just obediently surrender your body." 

He stares up at her with wide brown eyes before jolting upwards, almost falling into a tangle and grasping onto the bottom of her haori. "Can it still be used? Is it still alive?" he demands urgently. He tugs, fresh tears welling up and spilling down his cheeks. "Can't I still live?" 

She reaches out, grasping her haori and shaking him off it. Stepping over his body, she ascends the stairs once more. "If I hadn't pulled your soul into my domain, probably not," she says. "That Curse pulverized half your heart and most of your left lung. You wouldn't die immediately, but it's a fatal blow all the same." Sitting down once more, she gazes down the stairs at the boy laying at their foot. "And as my Vessel, that body is a panacea to a Curse that's already absorbed so much of my power." 

"I want to live," Itadori says, scrambling to his feet and scrubbing at his face. He clenches his hands and teeth, staring up at her intently. "You just want me to get stronger, right? Instead of being peacefully executed. Well, I can become stronger as long as I'm alive!" 

"Good for you," she murmurs, "you finally have the self-preservation of a bug. So?" She lifts a clawed hand, pointing upward. "That Curse you can't beat is out there. Are you surrendering it, or not?" 

His mouth firms, tilting down at the corners. "Fine," he says. "I'll let you use it as long as it takes to defeat that Curse!"

It's the furthest thing from a binding vow, but Sukuna really doesn't like making those to begin with, and she already has one with him. There will definitely be negative effects, but - what does that matter?

"Fine, fine, whatever," she says, flicking her fingers at him. "Then I'm going." 

From the depths of the blood sea, a giant bone hand surges out and slaps down. Itadori yells with fear and alarm, but the fingers merely clamp loosely over him, forming a cage. With the interloper trapped, Sukuna feels comfortable reaching up and out and into the body.

Ah, no joke, that kid felt a lot of pain. The body is still skewered on that smirking Curses' arm. So, this is what it looks like when her power overrides a Curse Womb, huh? It can't really become a copy of her, but there is some sort of weird bleed over. 

Too bad even like this, she's incapable of incarnating through it. It's possibly the repercussion of having originally been a human. It takes a truly powerful Curse Spirit to override the will of a typical cursed object, after all. 

Either that, or brain-case did something really annoying. 

The Curse Spirit cocks its head, peering at her confusedly with those four eyes as she reaches up and sets her palm against the arm going through her chest.

"Cleave," she says lightly. 

The arm bursts into slices, only the Curse's quick leap back allowing it to escape further damage. Sukuna casually fishes the remnants out of the hole in the Vessel's chest, running enough Reversed Energy through the Vessel to maintain function without healing the damage done to the heart and lungs. 

It puts something of a damper on finally being embodied again. She stretches and takes a good breath, but inside this Fingerbearer's domain, there's not much fresh air to breathe and the stretches only serve to hinder her movements. She smooths a hand up the side of the throat and over the short, bristling hairs at the bottom of his skull, rubbing the last of the frightened tension out of the body. 

"Infants are really the worst," she mutters, rolling her head to glance at the Curse Spirit, even as it inhales, building up another spitball of pure cursed energy. "Just needy, thoughtless little cretins. Someone really ought to teach you to behave.

"First-"

She holds up a hand and cleaves through the ball of cursed energy. "Know. Your. Betters." 

Hostility rushes out in an unending torrent, causing the Cursed Spirit to flinch back, even as its skin begins abrading and leaking purple. The one hand it still has flies up to protect its bulging, lidless eyes. It shakes and trembles, the very intimidation tactics a newborn used against two humans turned right back on it. 

But the same as a child that doesn't understand a lit stove is hot, it still wants to fight back. 

"Second," she says, "children aren't to be seen or heard." 

In an instant she is under the Curse's guard, dropping and sweeping into a kick doubled with her cursed energy, knocking the Curse flying upward into the artificially expanded height of its domain. It crashes into a wall, sending concrete plummeting down, some pieces landing on the walkway and blowing back dust. 

Sukuna straightens, casually neatening Itadori's obliterated school uniform while washing another wave of energy through it to keep the blood flowing. Having only one working lung is rough, but nothing she can't handle. 

The Fingerbearer throws itself back down at Sukuna, moving at an eye watering speed while she tugs the cuffs of her sleeves. Just at the moment of impact, Sukuna side steps, moving around the lunging Curse to grab it by the pseudo-hair on the back of its head, tossing her weight into dragging it over and flinging it to the water-covered floor below with the combined inertia of both it and herself. 

It's no more than six inches of water, but the impact is so severe that water flies up all the way to the walkway anyway. 

"Ah, excuse me," she mutters. "Third: speak only when spoken to."

Leaping lightly into the air, she plummets after it. Water splashes up at her feet in a blinding sheet that the Curse attempts to take advantage of, but Sukuna doesn't even blink or look back, flicking her fingers. "Dismantle." 

Two arms fly past her body while the torso collapses into the water beside her feet. She turns to gaze down at it, listening to the strange little defiant noises it makes despite bleeding out. The open wounds of its limbs begin to bubble a little bit, and she sighs. 

"This again," she says, lip curling. Then, she shrugs. "Well, to spare the rod is to ruin the child." 

Kicking the torso away even as its limbs regenerated, Sukuna raises her hands and folds her fingers together. "Domain Expansion," she intones. 

Reality warps as her soul acts upon it, shifting that which is metaphysical into that which is mundane. Malevolent Shrine encroaches upon the world with a clatter of bones and the snapping of teeth, the hot smell of glowing embers and hissing steam. 

In an instant, the Curse is flayed, skin unraveling while blood gushes out like a wrung rag. Entrails burst forth, tumbling out of an empty cavity, and next the body disassembles into shanks, shoulders, rump, ribs, loin… but as a Curse Spirit, specifically an infant, it really doesn't hold its form too well. 

Sukuna steps forward and retrieves the only important part of that mess, which is her finger. What's left of the Cursed Spirit's physical form melts into sludge. She tsks, even as her soul relinquishes its hold on reality and Malevolent Shrine folds away with one last billowing cloud of smoke and steam. 

It's the work of a moment to make her way back up onto the walkway, after which she pauses, turning her attention inward. She has no interest in that hedgehog dilemma boy, but—

In the next moment, Itadori's stomach rumbles. "Ah," she says softly, leaning her head back. That's.

A problem.

Notes:

Yuuji: Sukuna hates being looked down on, so I can goad him to do what I want!
Yuuji: How could this possibly go wrong?
Sukuna: heh.

sukuna's four arms are made for cradling (ʘ‿ʘ✿)

I've basically determined that Domain Expansion also works with Disclosure (/Showing your Hand); if you want to give your DE a boost, you say the name of your Domain.
You'll notice that Sukuna is a bit souped up. She'd have to be. Getting the isekai bonus power-up on top of having 'remodeled'? Yeah.

Chapter 5

Notes:

⇱the hands that cradled your face are soaked in unfathomable quantities of blood

⇲but they cradled me, yes?

Two hours of freedom later, the wretched Cotton Swab catches up with her. Sukuna had done a passable job suppressing her cursed energy, but she honestly hadn't tried very hard. Cotton Swab isn't the first Six Eyes inheritor that she's dealt with, and he's both old enough and skilled enough with it that she already knew it was simply a matter of time.

She's not trying to escape, anyway, she's just hungry. Still, two hours. Some allowances should be given for the fact that he'd left on some kind of business trip, but she could have caused so much destruction in the meantime! Or perhaps it was the lack of which that stumped them for so long, who knows. 

In either case, Cotton Swab catches up with her while she's sitting on a public bench, just having finished her second meal and gearing up for the third.

"Well, I just don't know what to say," Cotton Swab says, looming over her while pedestrians pass by, utterly unaware of the danger they're in. "Of all places for a Curse like you to hang out!"

Sukuna glances at him with one spare secondary eye, sucking pointedly on her nearly empty cup of soda. There's another drink to go with the third meal she'd bought with money lifted off some idiot. 

Cotton Swab peers at her rather hard - or rather, at the hole in his student that she'd covered up by stripping off the ragged jacket and tying the sleeves over her shoulders. "You obviously know Reversed Curse Technique," he says lightly, a thin thread of threat in the words. "So you must be suppressing Yuuji with that. Yikes~ so dangerous~" 

"Someone has to be. Since your elders aren't scared of you at all," she agrees, opening the bag and retrieving the hamburger. Peeling the wrapper back, she takes a large bite out of it - say what you want about teenage boys, but they definitely have the ability to pack it away. 

"Not like you are, right," he says cheerfully. "You made it so easy to find you!"

Sukuna looks up at him with as much disrespect as she can put on her face while chewing. Whatever, she decides; between Cotton Swab and food, she knows which one is more important. Even if the fast food isn't particularly tasty, for all that she'd been craving it like crazy ever since she woke up in the modern world.

It should have been delicious. She vaguely remembers enjoying it, at least a little.

But apparently her palate is no longer suited to it. What she really wants is a whole suckling pig, roasted until the skin crackles under her teeth, and a bottle of Uraume's specialty wine to cut through the grease. 

Well, it's not entirely pig she wants to eat, but that's a little difficult to indulge with only three fingers and Cotton Swab in the picture. Life as an incarnation has been boring already without Itadori being locked up or executed, and - well, there's a good chance that Itadori will be like her. That the first taste won't be the last. 

Then those annoying Clan sorcerers will really have an aneurysm. 

Sukuna licks the dribbling tomato juice off the side of her hand. There really has to be another Vessel around here that she can have with a minimum of fuss, right? With enough fingers, it wouldn't even matter how it looks, since she can just overwrite it with her Self. 

Cotton Swabs exhales quietly, not really a sigh. "Alright," he says with a smile as soft and gentle as a cloud, and infinite malice underneath, "I'll play along and ask first. What's it gonna take to get Yuuji back? Hmm?"

Stuffing the last bite into her mouth, Sukuna sucks down half the remaining drink as she stands. Then she leans over sideways into his space just shy of her Vessel's shoulder touching his chest, an atom's width of infinity between them, and looks up his nostrils with all four eyes. 

"Give me one good reason I shouldn't let him drop dead right here," she says. 

Cotton Swab's gentle smile twists a little wider, baring the slightest edge of sharp teeth. 

For a second, it looks like… come to think of it, that chin and those teeth… ?

It's probably entirely a coincidence. It's all one clan, no matter the name. There are only so many different facial features that can be rearranged in different combinations that there are bound to be duplicates. Even if they worked hard not to inbreed too much, there's always going to be some inbreeding in sorcerer clans, especially when they're trying so hard to create powerhouses with both Limitless and the Six Eyes. 

But even if it's a coincidence, it puts Sukuna in a good mood the way eating so much food that filled the Vessel's belly but failed to sate her hunger didn't.

Sukuna stands straight once more, glancing at all these oblivious, soft little sheep raised for slaughter. "It depends," she says at last. "A fight is one thing. But these little political games…" 

"Oh, they're so annoying," Cotton Swab says, clasping his hands together and leaning sideways a little. He still hasn't managed to put that little sliver of teeth away, and his words pitch and roll with a manic brightness that dips from delighted disbelief and murderous rage. "You know, maybe I should turn myself into a cursed object and sleep for a thousand years! Except fingers were your thing and eyes are significantly weirder, as body parts, to pass around!"

"Okay, okay," Sukuna says, flipping her fingers at him in a shooing gesture. "You can have the boy back, if there's a weekly meal in it for me." 

"A meal, is it? Is that all it is. You know, that's the wrong way of doing it~ you really can't say something like, 'if you don't go on a date with me, I'll kill myself', hahaha~ It's not cool at all! "

Sukuna sucks down the dregs of her drink, glancing at him with one incredulous eye. Cotton Swab would love nothing more than to smash her with his Limitless, or his weird combined technique… atom smasher, or whatever, but she's inhabiting his student's body and apparently he likes Itadori. 

That guy would probably happily torture her into giving up the kid's body, it's just that his techniques are all about obliteration and he didn't bring the healer. 

Also Itadori would be irrevocably traumatized by it. 

"Get a hold of yourself," she says, curling her lip and leaning further away from him. Ah, that's right. Now she remembers that this guy would get weird while killing those disaster class Cursed spirits. She counts, evidently. "I don't share meals. Either get me food weekly, or every time I take over, I'll be looking to source my own meat."

The air pressure drops. "No way," Cotton Swab chuckles, the way she would chuckle when those idiot warlords employed some random curse user and thought it would do something, "a thing like you doesn't actually need to eat! And the higher ups would be just impossible to convince!"

Sukuna tosses the empty soda cup to the side, where all the trash is piled up on the bench. "Oh, I have every confidence that you'd find a way without the 'higher ups' noticing, if it were something your dear student needed," she says. "The boy's body is weird enough as it is. I'm offering you a chance to get animal flesh on the table before I feed this body something more fulfilling and everyone gets to find out if that carries over, too." 

At last, the smirk turns into a full, teeth-baring, utterly humorless grin. "You understand why I wouldn't just take your word for it, right?" 

Ugh. Someone really needs to kick this idiot around. 

"Just because you can shrink kilometers into the space between cells," Sukuna sneers, "doesn't mean I'm so gracious. If the boy develops a taste, I hope you think back to this day every time." 

And normally, it takes Itadori to snatch the body back from her, but she releases her cursed energy and in front of the entire public walking by, blood gushes from the hole in the Vessel's chest. Darkness sweeps up, heavy and numb, as it pitches on its feet, leaving Sukuna with the blurry image of Gojo Satoru reaching out to catch it. 

-0-

There is no sound for Yuuji to hear. It is wet, but there are no drips. It is dark, but there are no bugs. The air is stagnant, and heavy. It smells weird, a little like… a meat shop. Although their finances were tight, sometimes his grandpa would tell him to go to the butcher and buy a cut of meat instead of picking up the prepackaged stuff at the grocery store. 

Yuuji had never thought twice about the way the butcher shop smelled, except he smells it here, and now, and his stomach pinches with hunger. 

Laying in the palm of a massive skeletal hand, Yuuji stares past what is unmistakably a rib cage and wonders if he's smelling his own insides. 

Is it? Isn't this his second stomach, he wonders. The liquid below, the pile of bones, the giant hand to fit with the giant ribs and vertebrae overhead? 

The fact that Sukuna caught him in this hand, and is now in charge of his body… well, earlier, he'd had a faint awareness of what was happening, like seeing a television with bad reception at an angle, the picture obscured with static, a sitcom track that cuts in and out. 

It blipped out after Sukuna followed that Curse into the water. It blipped out again when Gojo-sensei showed up. 

The only reassuring thing is that while Sukuna is piloting his body, the domestic violence couple have their shit together and are pretending to be normal. Yuuji would probably completely lose his mind and try fighting Sukuna for control of the body otherwise. 

Sukuna is probably so angry all the time because he can't leave here, actually. Yuuji kind of understands. 

Did he make the right choice, he wonders. He bargained to use Sukuna's power so that he could fight that Special Grade Cursed Spirit. But. He hadn't been able to fight it at all. He'd just kept getting hurt, over and over again. Is this what being a Sorcerer is like? Constantly throwing yourself in death's path? 

That thing broke his bones. Ground his flesh. Ruptured something inside him. Again and again and again. The pressure had been— his eyes had—

Stop. Don't think about it. 

Something makes Yuuji lift the palms of his hands from his eyes. Some kind of change. The dim fires lighting the cavern are flickering and flaring, and Yuuji sits up to see that Sukuna has returned, walking calmly on the top of the dark water, headed for the mountain of bone. Yuuji looks upwards, but he still hasn't regained awareness of the outside world.

"Wait," he says, "if you're here, who is in the body!" 

Sukuna stops walking, glancing up at him with an unimpressed expression. This is… really, his first good look at the Cursed Spirit, and it confirms something he'd vaguely realized earlier but hadn't thought about. Sukuna looks a lot like him, if a bit older, with slightly finer features and four red eyes and weird face tattoos. Yuuji is somewhat prepared for the four arms - he's not prepared for the thin wrists or the slender feet socks do nothing to hide. 

A woman!! Ryomen Sukuna is a woman!!!

"The body is dead for now," Sukuna answers - still deep, but now he realizes that the roughness covers the lack of depth.

"Huh?" Yuuji gasps. "But… but weren't you just eating with Gojo-sensei?! How come we're dead!"

Sukuna sneers, waving her hand. "Who was eating with him," she says, heading toward the mountain of bull skulls while the hand holding Yuuji jolts into motion, lowering him toward the steps. They pass each other as Yuuji is dropped onto the bottom step and Sukuna reaches the seat at the top. 

Or well, a throne, really. Atop a staircase built out of bent human skeletons is a seat of strange spines contorted at nauseating angles. An array of curved bones bracket the seat - ribs again, if so large that Yuuji is reluctant to think of what made them. Sheets of scarlet cloth hang, silent and still in the dead air, above which a roof looms heavy and black. 

It casts strange shadows that the balls of red flame that burn just above the water's surface fail to puncture. 

"Uh," Yuuji says, raising his hand. "How come you're a woman?" 

Out of the shadows obscuring the throne, luminescent red eyes appear, staring at him. "How come you're a boy?"

Uh. Because he was born that way? But he - but Sukuna - 

It suddenly feels really rude to speculate. 

"Hold up, forget that," Yuuji says, raising his voice. That's not the important part here! "Why didn't you ever heal that hole in my chest?! Didn't we make a contract?!"

The upper set of red eyes disappear, but the lower set continue to gaze at him from the darkness. "The vow just says I can use my cursed energy while you control the body," she says. "Not that I must." 

A terrible echo of the blow that struck straight through bone and flesh. Yuuji inhales sharply, staggering a bit. In this strange space, there hadn't been any pain; he'd been safe from the way his nerves screamed and burned with injuries no longer reflected on the flesh. But in this moment, it lashes him again, a reminder of how weak, how helpless-

"You bent. You did not break," the shadow on the throne says, and the breath leaves him like a blow to the stomach.

Sukuna had said that before. But what was the point? What was the reason for any of that? Why did he have to go through that, Sukuna could have saved him—

Yuuji opens his mouth to demand just that, but he hesitates.

He had gone out of his way to - well, he thought he was trying to understand Sukuna, since they have no choice but to exist together. But didn't he fail in the end? He'd just gotten a vague grasp on her temper, established that the evil, mass murdering spirit possessing him was malcontent but weirdly disinterested in being cruel to him, and… left it at that.

Sukuna hates humanity. Hates jujutsu sorcerers. Golden age for who, she'd sneered, and ah - as a woman, wouldn't she especially hate the way things were back then? Hadn't she said as much. 

Why would she save him?

It's not fair. This is his body. Sukuna is the invader. Because Sukuna exists in his body, Yuuji has to be executed. He doesn't want to die, but since he doesn't have a choice, he decided to take Sukuna with him, to save people. Saving people is why Yuuji ate the Finger to begin with. Because he'd needed the power to do so. 

Why did Sukuna become a Curse Object? Was how she died so terrible? Couldn't someone have done it the right way, so that Sukuna wouldn't survive down through the ages and incarnate through him? It's not fair.

Is it unjust, Sukuna asked as he hung in her arms, then become stronger. 

His Grandpa gave him a set of guidelines to live by, and even as he died right next to Yuuji, gave him one last order. One last 'curse', so that Yuuji wouldn't be the kind of person that would be put down like a rabid dog. 

And for the briefest moment, Yuuji had resented it. 

Just like the Principal had said he would.

And now what? Will he follow Sukuna through the ages, trapped inside her fingers with her? What was the point of any of this? What did he live for?! 

—! Right! Live for! Didn't he agree for her to use his body so he could survive!

"Is it really dead?" Yuuji demands, looking up the stairs at the two red eyes set far too wide. Like a creature, a monster, peering back at him from the dark, ancient and misshapen. "My body isn't dead, right? So what was the point of leaving that hole?"

"To deliver a grim reminder, of course," Sukuna says, words curling with malicious humor. "Right now, you're depending on that Cotton Swab to survive - but look at what happened! Three little rookies, sent to the location of a Curse Womb that changed its appearance… that Cotton Swab let his power go to his head. He needs a few failures to wake him up." 

In this weird humid space filled with bones and fire and some kind of shrine, Yuuji does not need to breathe - but out of habit, he does. And it comes a little easier. "So you really didn't kill it," he says, urgently climbing the steps until they can see eye-to-eye.

"It's dead 'for now'," Sukuna says, the red eyes disappearing. Her feet stick out from the shadows, and shake idly, geta hanging from the strap. "You can think of it as a sort of suspended animation - but later, when it's time, you can have it back. Whether it's dead or alive doesn't much matter to me, anyway - either way, it's still my Vessel."

The relief turns cold, and slowly, a smile twitches it's way onto Yuuji's face. A completely humorless smile. "W-… wait," he says, "what do you mean, it doesn't need to be alive?" 

All four eyes open, peering at him from the blackness. "Ask your teacher about it sometime," she says gloatingly. "You're just my insurance against that Cotton Swab, you know? But try to be a bit smarter. You're not very useful to me dead."

Ask your teacher, she says, and Yuuji thinks that it's always when he'll hear the last thing he wants to hear.

What's the point of an execution if it doesn't kill Sukuna? Then why is he getting killed?!

It must be that the execution will destroy his body, and Gojo-sensei will be able to keep Sukuna from escaping, he thinks. He hopes. That would make sense, right? Sukuna… Sukuna obviously isn't weak, and neither is Gojo-sensei, so… Yuuji is being used to avoid a game over. Because without Yuuji, they might as well go ahead and do the execution without hesitation.

Yuuji has been thinking… even if he has to die, that's still 'some time in the future' and so he hasn't sweated it. Like knowing on Monday that there's an exam on Friday, but right up until the exam happens, it doesn't feel like his problem. That's how he's been handling it. There's no point in worrying about something that won't happen in the next moment.

But now Yuuji has experienced what death is like. What pain is like. What struggling is like.

He wants to get stronger, but mostly to avoid those things. He doesn't want to die, not even to kill Sukuna - if he has to, then he'll definitely take her with him, but… he had just been making the best of a bad hand. 

Of course he wants to live, if he can. If Sukuna won't hurt anyone. 

And she might not. 

She killed the Special Grade, probably, because his awareness of the outside blipped back in while she was still in that room he died in. And she'd left without even coming in contact with Fushiguro, despite him being there in the rain, waiting for Yuuji. And she hadn't hurt anyone when she pickpocketed people, and didn't even hurt anyone when that first eatery got her order wrong. 

Yuuji knows fellow high school students who are less patient with the eatery workers than Sukuna. 

Sukuna… didn't save him when Yuuji wanted her to, but wasn't he still saved? 

-0-

Yuuji wakes up in the clinic a day later. 

According to Doctor Ieiri, Gojo-sensei had caught up with Sukuna, who had basically ditched the body to bleed out. Things could have been worse; Sukuna had kept the body in good condition, other than the massive hole in his chest and his heart and his lung. That enabled Gojo-sensei to immediately transport Yuuji's body to the on-site emergency clinic for Doctor Ieiri to save his life. 

"Ah, thank you very much," Yuuji exclaims, feeling a little bad about how exhausted Doctor Ieiri looks.

She smiles at him gently. "It's no problem. I got to see Satoru get a little emotional, so I'll accept that as your favor." 

Yuuji stares at her, suddenly a little wary, because - uh, she's a little unsettling somehow, all of the sudden. 

He doesn't really have time to contemplate that further, because Gojo-sensei shows up then. He seems cheerful enough, although Yuuji remembers all too clearly the moment he'd arrived at Sukuna's side, still looking exactly like this but feeling - feeling what? The domestic violence couple suddenly start complaining about another neighbor or something, maybe. But in hushed tones like they're not particularly looking to start an argument.

"Yo! Yuuji-kun," Gojo-sensei says, "How are you feeling now? No aches? No pains? Any unexpected cravings? Hmm?"

One of those things is not like the others!!

But still, Yuuji gives it a good solid thought while Doctor Ieiri gives them some space. It's mostly just the usual weird numb feeling. He feels better than he did after the fight on the school roof, actually, except- "Um, a little bit of an ache," he admits, holding his hand to his chest. "But other than that, I feel fine? Oh! I kind of want a milkshake!" 

"A milkshake huh," Gojo-sensei asks with a smile. "Well, it's not impossible to ship in ice cream for the dorms!" 

"Oh! Ice cream party!" Yuuji exclaims excitedly. 

Gojo-sensei still has Doctor Ieiri take another look at his chest, just to make sure nothing is wrong, and then Fushiguro and Kugisaki also arrive to give him a hard time about almost dying. Which then turns around on Kugisaki, because she got dumped with a lot of smallfry and almost died. 

It's not funny at all, but they all pretend it is.

What else is there to do? Cry about it? Yuuji already cried enough. 

Then Gojo-sensei slaps them all with a training schedule so intense that even though Yuuji really wants to get stronger, if only so he doesn't feel helpless like that ever again, it feels a little overwhelming. Apparently, they did a real good job, considering the circumstances, but now that it's happened, Gojo-sensei isn't taking chances. 

"Also, assassinations," Gojo-sensei chirps with his finger up in the air. He turns and points at Fushiguro and Kugisaki with that same finger, saying, "how sad~ you two were just collateral damage! You should hurry up and get stronger so those old mummies hire you your own assassins!" 

"Who wants to be assassinated?!" Kugisaki demands angrily, pointing back. "I don't have weird standards for myself like that! I'm here for the shopping! And the glamor! I want to live famously!" 

Fushiguro looks entirely too exhausted with a kind of dead-eyed stare at their teacher. 

"It's not far from living famously to living infamously! " Gojo-sensei points out cheerfully. "Anyway, you don't want to be wiped out like a background character in a horror show, right!"

He really knows how to push Kugisaki's buttons, because her cheeks puff up with indignation. She knows he's just pushing her buttons, but it's so obviously working. 

From deep inside Yuuji's chest, there's a faint, oh, so when I live infamously, I should be exorcised on the spot, but when it's your student… tch, nepotism at its finest.  

He can't quite stop the puff of amusement that escapes his pursed lips. Gojo-sensei turns toward him slightly and Yuuji has to quickly put his hands up and wave them around. If Sukuna wanted to be heard, she would have manifested a mouth and said it. 

"Fine," Kugisaki huffs. "I just wanted to live my life well, but since those raisins up top can't be reasonable, then I'll give them a reason!"

"Don't look at me," Fushiguro says flatly. "I'm taking every day as it comes." 

"Ugh," Kugisaki says, cutting him a side glance. "People born with everything are so annoying." Just for good measure, she also turns a judging gaze on Gojo-sensei as well, but he just smiles merrily. Clicking her tongue, she focuses on Yuuji. "Can you believe this? It's annoying!"

Yuuji … is kind of like them, though? Well, he wasn't born with Sukuna, but he still has a super powerful technique and a murderous evil spirit locked inside his soul, or something? But that was an accident, so. He tilts his head to the side with a clueless expression. 

"Ugh," Kugisaki repeats, rolling her eyes and stomping away. 

Yuuji scratches his cheek, feeling a little guilty. It's just that he's really in no frame of mind to try throwing his lot in with a faction, even playfully - even just cityslicker-vs-countryhick. He really needs some quiet so he can think. 

At least the training schedule doesn't start until tomorrow, so the rest of today is spent having a sort of lame, in-school ice cream party with Fushiguro and Kugisaki, and after that, he goes back to his dorm room and lays in his bed, staring at the ceiling. 

Other than that very brief jab at Gojo-sensei, Sukuna has remained silent and still inside him, like the domestic violence couple had a date night and so they're off terrorizing some restaurant instead of their neighbors for once. Only not quite that, either. Maybe they're having movie night and somehow put on the one movie they can agree on. 

Maybe a domestic violence couple don't always fight. Maybe sometimes there are good times that keep them together, despite how bad it normally is.

Maybe all the good times can't exist without the bad times, he thinks, carefully edging around the fact that he no longer means some allegory for the evil spirit in the pit of his chest, just to the right of his heart.

Notes:

and on that day, Gojo Satoru received a grim reminder...

Gojo: I specialize in being given an inch and taking a mile~
Sukuna: the fuck you do

King of Curses? No, King of Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss.

It's so upsetting that in the manga, Wasuke really does just fucking die with Yuuji in the room. He has to get the bed remote to call a nurse bc Grandpa died 😃

It's the work of god that Sikuna and Geto never met. The amount of fingerguns being thrown around and CEOs dying would be astronomical. Sikuna would eat the people and Geto would eat the curses and Gojo might just lose the plot and rule from a hollow throne cos HONESTLY, let's just good cop/bad cop this shit.

Chapter 6

The three students that Gojo-sensei recruited for his first year class are all of different strengths and weaknesses.  Fushiguro came equipped with an inherited bloodline technique, while Kugisaki has her own innate technique that she's skillful with. They can certainly sharpen those techniques, but frankly speaking, they need to be more flexible. 

And as for Yuuji, he needs to learn how to use cursed energy. 

While Gojo-sensei seems a little pleased that Yuuji has already managed to manifest some cursed energy, what Yuuji actually needs to learn is to do it on command, to do it regularly and steadily, and with a steady mood. 

Kugisaki wants to mutiny when she realizes that Yuuji's schoolwork is watching movies, but Gojo-sensei manages to calm her down by comparing it to watching Dora the Explorer when she's conversationally fluent. She's still not very happy about it, but she still gives up. 

However, Gojo-sensei's training is easier said than done, and the puppet has a powerful punch. They're probably a little lax with that, given that there's a doctor on premises. Yuuji has to take a short break when the third punch happens to land on his nose when he flinches, and a hot wet feeling sends him searching for kleenex. 

He gets hit less by the end of the day, but watching movies all day long with a stuffed puppet and a sore face isn't actually as fun as it sounds. His whole body feels weird and jittery, so before dinner, he goes out on a run. His heart beats powerfully in his chest, and his chest swells with the night air. It doesn't even stink as much as the business districts, given the forest that surrounds the school. 

It would take digging really deep before he could exhaust himself this way - run as fast as he can, as far as he can. But it's already getting a little dark and it's a bit too dangerous for other pedestrians. Besides, a leisurely pace is enough to settle him down. 

The six of them bicker over dinner - the second years joined them, since they were training with Kugisaki and Fushiguro - and it's pretty good. Yuuji gets to hear about their training, which is really just sparring with a variety of weapons thanks to Maki-senpai, or boxing with Panda. Neither involve Inumaki, which makes Yuuji a lot more curious about him even though he has the run-down on his technique.

Does cursed speech make physical fighting inadvisable? Inumaki-senpai looks small and mean, if you ask Yuuji. He gets in a lot of fights, so he knows the scrappy, bad tempered ones when he sees them, even if they have a bowl cut and long eyelashes and very casually speak only various onigiri fillings. 

Well, it's not really his place to say anything, or at least he won't tonight. He'll ask Gojo-sensei next time he sees him, he decides. 

Later, as he gets ready for bed, he finally figures out what's fucking him up about all of this. 

Yuuji really isn't a manga fanatic. He's read a lot because his classmates read them, and reading manga is a clean, innocent hobby to indulge in - by which he means, it's not athletics. In any athletic club, Yuuji is constantly running the risk of forgetting himself, of getting startled and using his full strength, and hurting someone or destroying something. 

Yuuji basically thinks of himself as a guy with a 'bad temper' - even if his teachers call him 'steady' and his classmates call him 'chill.' It's actually just that Yuuji… doesn't really feel many things very strongly. And so he can attack a curse barehanded, and so he can snatch his body back, and so the only family he has can die and he can agree to get killed over the ashes with dry eyes. 

But his temper is bad, because when he's frustrated, when he's upset, it's all too easy to break something. Doors. Baseball bats. People. 

It comes in a hot, blinding flash, and then he's left with the aftermath thinking, ah, that was bad.  

Knowing what he knows now about cursed energy, he thinks that's why he never had any of it. He doesn't have any fears or hatred or regrets to generate it, not until he was scared to death. Not until he regretted how he ended up in this situation. 

Teaching himself to feel those things, not just for a split second of overwhelming power, but steadily, is hard. 

Anyway, the point is, Yuuji isn't a manga fanatic but he's read a lot. And what's fucking him up is that… everything is just so normal except for the fact that they go out to fight curses and will probably die doing it. It's like the genre is all messed up. It can't make up its mind whether his life is a horror manga, or a slice of life.

Yuuji keeps pretending to be normal out of habit, but none of this is actually normal. 

Gojo-sensei wants to do normal things with them, like take them out to eat and let them have ice cream parties in the dorms, but Yuuji has an execution in his future and assassins after his head. 

It's good, and fun. Yuuji likes that Gojo-sensei does these things. 

But somehow it feels like a bigger slap in the face when the terrible things happen. 

Jarring. 

"Sukuna," Yuuji says, and blinks. He didn't mean to say that, to call out to the devil in his chest. Then he thinks about it for a split second, even as he forces that little imaginary gag like he's gonna hurl. "Sukuna-chan?" 

There's an abrupt hot, angry coiling that rises as Sukuna manifests herself on his face. Something he hadn't thought twice about is super weird now that he knows she's a girl. "No," she says, a little sharp. 

Okay, Yuuji thinks. Not Sukuna-chan. It hadn't felt right, really, but now that he knows she's a girl, he kind of wanted to make up for it. 

"What do you think of sensei's training?" he asks. 

"It'll work," she says, just as conversational as ever, as if Yuuji never almost died because of her. "He's a little too soft on you guys, considering that I'm incarnating, which should be a clue. But at least you're getting training now." 

Some part of him goes on alert. "What do you mean?" 

He can kind of feel Sukuna's eyes moving around in his face, which is super weird. "He should really know better, given his circumstances," she says. "After a thousand years, suddenly I have a Vessel? But maybe those elders of his are keeping him distracted."

Maybe that is what has been bothering Yuuji all along. Sukuna has been fairly quiet, but maybe it isn't a 'giving space' quiet. Maybe it's an anticipatory quiet. 

He suddenly wants to jump up and go next door to bang on Fushiguro's door and talk to him about it. 

"You think… me eating your finger wasn't a coincidence?" Yuuji asks.

"Do you? " she says. 

He kind of did. Before now, anyway. 

"Even if it were," she adds, "there are lots of people who will take advantage of the chaos when the King of Curses is incarnating. Not just sorcerers, but curse users will gain a boost in the upcoming days."

"Curse users?" Yuuji asks. "What's that?" 

"Isn't it just a moral disagreement?" Sukuna asks dismissively. "Both are humans that use cursed energy. Back then, I was called a curse user, but what I did wasn't any different than those Clan sorcerers, it's just that I was a 'freelancer'. It really pissed them off that someone without a Clan was better than them."

Sukuna's smug satisfaction curls hot and hungry through his chest. 

"So… there are evil sorcerers?" Yuuji asks slowly.

"What is 'evil' anyway," Sukuna says, the satisfaction cooling into apathy. "Talking about 'good and evil' is useless. Those sorcerers back then called me 'evil' when I destroy a warlord's army. They don't say the warlord was evil when his army slaughtered peasants, stealing their food and burning their fields so the survivors starved.

"That Tadashi person was scum," she adds, "who only hurt people while he was alive. For his selfish pleasures, he broke the laws and didn't learn his lesson, so that a child died. You had a moment of weakness when that mother cried about it, but didn't he hurt her, too? Can she lift her head as the mother of a murderer?"

"I think her pain matters," Yuuji says quietly, without thought. 

"Oh?" 

It's… not that Yuuji empathizes, or anything. He's not very emotional. Grandpa's death had, very briefly, cracked him in two, and then… and then, that was it. He can't empathize with Tadashi's mother's worry or pain. Grandpa asked him to help people, but Yuuji hadn't been thinking about that at all when he'd decided to bring Tadashi, or otherwise his corpse. 

Even if it had been painful for Tadashi's mom, it still mattered. 

Right. Whether either of them were right or wrong, Yuuji just felt… he could, so he would. 

Although it was Fushiguro who had followed up on that - stopped escaping long enough to rip off the name tag on Tadashi's clothes. 

If nothing else, Tadashi's mom still needed someone who would look her in the eye and tell her it was okay to love her son, even if he were trash. 

It's not the same as Yuuji's Grandpa, because he was just unfriendly. As far as Yuuji knows, Grandpa never did anything bad or evil, he was just cranky and unhappy all the time. But he was kind. And he loved Yuuji, even though Yuuji—

Ah. 

Yuuji sucks in a deep breath, holding it in his healed lungs for a moment, until he can feel his heart beating in his chest, and then lets it all out. "I think it matters," he says. "The little things, I mean. Ice cream parties, and class dinners." 

"If you say so," Sukuna says disinterested. "The point is that there's no functional difference between curse users and sorcerers, it's just their goals are different. Neither are inherently stronger or weaker. Answer this: when you're using magic, what do you think is the most important aspect?"

Yuuji is a little stunned, and a little amused that he has an ancient evil spirit calling cursed energy 'magic'. Isn't it the other way around when stuff like this happens? The ancient evil spirit always insists on proper terminology while the host blows them off to compare it to something different? More accessible? 

Instead, here's Sukuna, willingly and without much hesitation calling 'cursed energy' magic. 

"Uh," he says, tossing that line of thought aside and focusing on the question. What would be the most important aspect of using magic? Power? Spells? But Gojo-sensei already told him that he wouldn't have his own spells. Or well, to use Gojo-sensei's analogy, he doesn't own an 'appliance'. 

Cursed energy is generated by emotions, but Gojo-sensei is teaching him how to feel things while keeping a level head. So that's…

"Mentality?" Yuuji asks, tilting his head to the side - despite the 'teacher' not being able to see it from the outside. 

"That's right," Sukuna agrees. "Its mentality. Isn't it always mentality when using powers? In any situation involving humans, one of the most important aspects of the interaction is 'mentality' - or to phrase it another way, 'psychological warfare.'"

"Huh?" he says, tilting his head the other way. 

"If you go into a fight lacking confidence, then you'll die," Sukuna says bluntly. "When you faced that Special Grade, you didn't think 'I'll win' or 'I'll survive' - you thought 'I'll run away.'"

Frowning, he sits up a little straighter. "But I didn't though? I - I really fought it." 

"You never planned to face it yourself," she disagrees with a sneer. "You always intended to use me to protect yourself. And even then, you thought 'I'll die'. When you go into a fight thinking 'I'll die', even if it's as a self-sacrifice ploy, then what other choice do you have but dying?" 

A silence descends on the bedroom, but Yuuji's too stunned to do anything about it. Cursed energy is produced by emotion. So he's been thinking about it like his heart - the metaphorical one, not the physical one - is a battery. But just like there are bootleg brands of snacks, if the emotions he's using are bad, then… 

"You know," Yuuji says without meaning to, "you're a really good teacher." 

"Boy, your standards are shit," Sukuna says with faint disbelief, and then she's gone, like a popcorn kernel stuck in his throat that finally went down. 

Despite the fact that they'd had a relatively good conversation right now, Sukuna is as quiet as she'd been since the detention center fiasco. It's weird and makes Yuuji feel a little uneasy. Before, the steady simmer of agitation had made it impossible for him to ignore the fact that he was possessed. Now, the lack of it is nearly as distracting. 

It's been less than a month? 

But in the same way Grandpa died and that was that, Sukuna barrels into his life and that's that, too. 

-0-

Despite Yuuji's best efforts, Sukuna doesn't come out to talk again after that. However, she does start up that same simmering dissatisfaction again, which is better than nothing. 

Then Gojo-sensei kidnaps him out of bed one night to go fight a Special Grade curse, ostensibly to teach him about Domain Expansion. 

"No, he just wants to look cool," Sukuna says, popping up on Yuuji's cheek. 

"Well, it's the only thing you special grade Curses are good for!" Gojo-sensei says cheerfully. 

"Wait, weren't we just at school? How are we out here!" Yuuji wonders, looking around from where he dangles from his teacher's grasp. 

"That's your teacher's bloodline technique, Limitless," Sukuna says. "It's a math-idiot's worst nightmare." 

Gojo-sensei idly shakes Yuuji, although he knows that it's aimed more at Sukuna than himself. "That's one way of putting it," he says, sounding amused but in a terrible, cold way, "if really funny coming from you!"

Yuuji feels a curl of bored apathy from Sukuna. He's caught by the idea that Gojo-sensei seems to find Sukuna deeply annoying, while Sukuna thinks of him as a mild inconvenience at most. Which is weird, considering that whole talk they had about her treating Yuuji as insurance. 

"Peh," Mt. Fuji Head says, the water he's standing in suddenly billowing with steaming. "You three! Stop pretending I'm invisible!"

"Oh," Sukuna drawls, "is there something here? I thought it was a cricket chirping." 

"You-! I could kill you and your Vessel right here!"

Sukuna chortles heartily, even as Yuuji feels her cursed energy surging. It's cuttingly sharp, writhing around them with a flood of malicious mockery. She says nothing more, but she doesn't need to; Mt. Fuji is smoking and steaming. 

"Wow," Gojo-sensei says, doing a combination of lifting Yuuji higher while also bending like he's crouching down to Yuuji's level. He holds up a hand as if to whisper to Yuuji, but his voice is bright and clear as he says, "what a hot head! Hehe~ his lid's really about to blow~" 

As if on command, Mt. Fuji really does exactly that. It's accompanied by a miasma of cursed energy that blows out, rushing over as if to crush the three of them - Yuuji ends up not very affected, since Sukuna's energy sharpens to cut through the wave, but what's left is plenty overwhelming. It's even stronger than Sukuna, he realizes with no little dread. 

"Listen here, you 'hehe' bastard!" the Curse Spirit bellows. "I'll burn you alive! There won't even be ash!" He clasps his hands together in a weird gangsign, and calls out: "Domain Expansion!"

-0-

"Um, what now," Yuuji wonders sometime later, standing alone in a field of artificially grown flowers. 

He and Sukuna ponder this for a while. It's been a very exciting night, after being upended out of bed by Gojo-sensei and hauled off to learn Jujutsu magic, and getting the feeling that Gojo-sensei and Sukuna really don't like each other which makes Yuuji feel very awkward, stuck in the middle as he is. 

He's in his pajamas, so he very naturally doesn't have his phone and can't call for a ride. Not that he'd know who to call for one in the first place. He only has Gojo-sensei and his classmates in there, and Gojo-sensei took off after that second Special Grade when Sukuna had rescued Yuuji from the weird root monster. 

"We shouldn't be far from the road," Sukuna says at last. "Unless that Cotton Swab just wanders around the forest at night." 

"Ah! Right," Yuuji says, hitting a fist into his palm. 

It takes him a moment longer to orient himself, but eventually he discovers the trail of broken trees that leads back to the road. The road is also pretty messed up, very clearly highlighted by a lone car that almost halts, but still tentatively insists on driving past the cracked pavement. 

Yuuji's not really sure why that sight has such an impact on him. 

He thinks about it for a while after randomly choosing a direction to walk and going. Up until now, he's mostly faced off against small cursed spirits that don't do environmental damage - that cursed spirit Kugisaki nailed even phased through walls! Then again, he does have access to someone who should know the answer.

"The easiest answer is just power," Sukuna says with a bored tone. "The long answer is that what sorcerers call 'Special Grade' have rudimentary souls, which require a container, and so the Curse has a 'body'. Vengeful Spirits, which are what dead Sorcerers turn into if improperly killed, likewise retain a portion of their soul. It's not just because of the devastation a vengeful spirit can cause that drives sorcerers to eliminate them." 

"Wait… Mt. Fuji has a soul?" Yuuji asks, bewildered. 

"That's right. Though it's hard to tell at a glance whether he's what you would consider a 'natural disaster' curse, or if that guy is at least part Vengeful Spirit. If it's the latter, then it's likely someone's grandmother."

"Ah!! Gojo-sensei ripped the head off someone's grandmother," Yuuji blurts in shock. 

Though not much horror. Even if Mt Fuji was someone's grandmother, Yuuji isn't sure he remembers that. Or how long it's been. He was scary! Way too scary! Even if Gojo-sensei overpowered him easily, it was still scary! 

"Some cursed spirits have the idea that they're the 'true' humanity," Sukuna continues after a second, like it had taken her a moment to recall something. "Because they're the basest and most honest manifestation of what makes humans, humans - as animals don't create curses." 

Yuuji frowns faintly. He's not sure how he feels about that. He kind of gets the logic… okay, no he doesn't. A human is a human and a curse is a curse. Why would a curse even want to be considered a human? Isn't that… kind of like acknowledging that curses are less than humans? 

Just proudly be a curse, or whatever.

"What do you think?" Yuuji asks.

"What does it matter."

"Aren't you the perfect one to ask, though?" Yuuji stops walking, tilting his head and trying to peer down at his cheekbone. He really doesn't succeed at all, just straining his eye a bit. "You use to be a human, and now you're a cursed spirit, right?"

"It's useless to ask me about the reality of existence or the meaning of humanity," Sukuna says, sounding bored. "A question like that is ultimately pointless and just seeks to justify an 'other' to crush beneath your feet. That's placing too much importance on labels applied by society. Those labels have their uses, but trying to define yourself by someone else's meaning is the path to ruin."

Yuuji very slowly reaches up and puts a hand to his head. "Whoa, that's heavy," he says, a little stunned.

"As a sorcerer, it's something you should think more about," Sukuna adds dryly. "More importantly, if someone tries to kill you, it's okay to kill them back."

Humming, Yuuji turns that thought over in his head before lowering his hand to point. "But what if I can talk them out of it?"

"Then you'll need to be stronger."

"As much as I hate to agree with the King of Curses, that's right!"

Yuuji startles hard. "Gojo-sensei," he yelped, turning around to see his teacher, blindfold and all. "Sukuna, you couldn't warn me?"

"Yo," Gojo-sensei says, lifting his hand with a pleasant smile. "Unfortunately, that flower curse still got away. I'm here to pick you up!"

"Aw, man, really?" Yuuji sags in place a little. "I thought for sure if you weren't being held back…"

"It's not that," his teacher says, waving it off in a manner that seems weirdly familiar. "After all, it was also Special Grade, and in a forest, it already had home team advantage!"

"And with two Special Grades showing up suddenly, working together, you couldn't rest assured there wasn't an ambush," Sukuna says, a little mockingly.

Yuuji's overcome by embarrassment. This is so awkward! He hastily reaches up to cover the mouth on his cheek, but Sukuna's energy just gives a little affronted twist and retreats.

At least Gojo-sensei doesn't seem very upset. He laughs a little, which seems okay, even if it sends a cold chill up Yuuji's spine. "There's also that," he says lightly. "Say, Yuuji-kun, how often do you have little chats with Sukuna?" 

"Oh, uhh," he hesitates, feeling a little like he's been caught sneaking cookies. "From… the beginning? We could kind of talk when you asked me to switch that night, but the mouth thing only happened after the second finger."

"I see," Gojo-sensei says, but he doesn't seem mad about it, so maybe Yuuji isn't in trouble. "Yuuji, were you thinking about how that Special Grade could converse, unlike other cursed spirits that just repeat grievances?"

"Not really," he admits, thinking back. "I guess I didn't think about it much. It was trying to kill us."

"That's right," Gojo-sensei agrees. "Anyway, the other one took off with its head, so it definitely survived. Having two unregistered Special Grade curses running around… things sure are getting exciting."

"Oh," Yuuji says, "that's right - Sukuna said that things aren't a coincidence. Her Incarnating, and everything, I mean."

"Oh, did she," he says, smiling a little bit. "I'm a little curious. Have you ever seen Sukuna? Like in a memory or something?"

A memory? Yuuji tilts his head. Did he mean like… in one of Yuuji's memories, or memory sharing? Though it doesn't matter, because neither of those have happened that he knows of. "Not like that," he admits, "but a few days ago, she brought me into her domain so I didn't die."

"Is that so," Gojo-sensei says, smile widening. "When were you going to say that Sukuna is female?"

"Ah!" Yuuji jolts into a straight posture, shoulders drawn together. "Sensei! How did you know!"

Gojo-sensei reaches out, patting Yuuji on the head. "Just earlier gave it away," he admits. "Which is weird! Because we have dozens of records about Ryomen Sukuna's life, and even if you allow for bias and distortion over the years… he definitely wasn't a woman."

"Yeah, yeah," Yuuji says eagerly, "I was really confused, too! Because-" Yuuji abruptly concludes that he really can't admit why he sincerely thought that Sukuna was a man. "But you could tell just from her being on my face, huh?"

"Well, there are some secrets of adulthood you don't need to worry about yet," his teacher says, ruffling Yuuji's hair. "Alright, I'll take you back. There'll be a change in the movie line-up tomorrow!"

"Aw, sensei, more movies? Didn't you bring me out to look at Domain Expansion? Let's cover that topic!"

Unfortunately, his pleas fell on deaf ears, and he was all too quickly dropped onto his bed with Gojo-sensei nowhere in sight. 

Notes:

Yuuji: Oh yeah, Sukuna and I talk a lot!
Gojo, concerned: alright kiddo, time to watch the prank-date and gaslight movies!

Sukuna, being female:
Gojo: whomst the fuck are you

Japanese is notoriously gender neutral so you can forget about dialogue giving that away.

cursed energy theories to the tune of "this is my fic and I do what I want". Also Fuji's blackened teeth are why he's grandma now.
As Sikuna adjusts to being in modern times, you'll see more modernisms coming back to her.

Chapter 7

Notes:

cw for cannibalism and Yuuji being traumatized by Sikuna again

Gently massaging the bridge of her nose, Sukuna tries again to try to remember — anything. Seeing that Mt. Fuji curse had reminded her that the original Sukuna fought him in a city, although she's not entirely sure under what context. It's already shocking enough that she managed to remember that those cursed spirits had been obsessed with being the… was it 'new' or 'true' humans? She can't remember. It doesn't matter. It amounts to the same thing.

Probably because she'd encountered that same thought during her life. Back in the Heian era, it wasn't exactly a popular belief, but among the cursed spirits that could think about their own existence, at least some of them thought it. But even they'd been united with their other sentient brethren and simply wanted to build their own country. 

These, she thinks, want to take over the world or Japan or something. 

Anyway, they aligned themselves with that brain-case, so they should die with him. 

The only good thing to come out of that whole excursion was getting a good look at that Cotton Swab's domain. Though Cotton Swab is only the third Limitless user she's encountered, no technique works the same for every user, so it's basically useless to compare them. It's a bit interesting that the shape his takes by default is a barrier when the other two had manifested as a localized time freeze and teleportation. 

Though clearly he's learned something from his Clan's records, given that he's mastered the teleportation aspect.

But not the time freeze. 

Then again, those are rather in opposite directions of manifestation. Which is fine, really, he doesn't need to be more overpowered than he already is - she saw enough in his domain. Even being unable to experience it completely the way that Mt. Fuji curse did as her and her Vessel's souls overlap, it was terribly informative. 

It's a technique that's basically tied into the laws of physics, but - haha, a perfect, undefeatable technique doesn't exist. 

Chuckling mirthlessly, Sukuna bares her teeth. And she was so kind to that Cotton Swab, not giving away how his power works… it's not like he'd get the benefits from Disclosure if she gave it away. Did that little habit not make it into the records? 

Well, maybe those crusty old elders didn't want anyone to get ideas. 

Sucks to be them.

-0-

Recently there hasn't been anything interesting going on with her Vessel, so Sukuna mostly focuses on trying to remember what brain-case's grand plan was when he did all of this. She's remembered finally that she's by far not the only sorcerer from the past that will be incarnating, but the memory comes with such a feeling of disinterest that Sukuna suspects that it's not the end-game. 

People like that brain-case are never straightforward about their bullshit. It's all telling the truth by a technicality, just like those natural disaster curses he's leading around by the nose. 

They're a red herring, she's pretty sure. Muddying the water. 

That brain-case may be older than her, but she's been on more battlefields than him. Been hunted more than him, trapped and ambushed more than him, fear and loathed more than him, has hunted more than him, eaten more than him-

The abrupt doorbell ringing from her Vessel almost comes as a relief. Almost. Sukuna doesn't actually require distractions from her black moods after so many years of experience, and anything that Itadori wants her for is bound to be annoying.

It takes little effort to expand her awareness, taking note of the unfamiliar surroundings. Ugh, she thinks, reading the cursed energy in the air; some Clan's household. The Gojo one, given that the Cotton Swab is standing there with a funny little smirk. 

Slitting open the eyes on Itadori's face, she observes the scroll cases, empty with the scrolls pinned to display boards. The shape of things is immediately apparent. 

"Let's make a deal," Cotton Swab says, clapping his hands together like a kid. "There aren't many images that survived from your time, for obvious reasons, but I'm a little curious. I'll hold up my end of that deal you talked about, for about - oh - a month? If you'll identify the subject of these scrolls!" 

Sukuna gives him a perfunctory glance. It must be that she's been thinking so hard about the brain-case that she suddenly sees through it: the fact that Cotton Swab rebelled against such a simple request because that's too much like being treated as a servant. 

Instead, he's twisted it around to make it into a situation of her being a dog performing tricks for a treat. 

Manifesting a mouth, she marvels, "having you for a teacher is really seven lifetimes of bad luck." 

Cotton Swab's generally pleasant expression turns sharp.

"Hey, that's not true," Itadori protests, shifting. "If it weren't for sensei, I'd probably be executed already." 

"And just think, we wouldn't be in this situation and you wouldn't be fighting for your life against Special Grade curses," Sukuna says, unconvinced. 

In her day, everyone died from curses anyway; only the nobles could afford to feed money into the empty, gaping maws of the sorcerer clans so that they mostly died of natural causes… i.e., the machinations of their fellow nobles. But in this era, plenty of people go around completely ignorant of the harsh truth of their world, living their boring little normal lives. 

That was never a possibility for Itadori, but he doesn't know that. 

"That's not so bad," Itadori says, a little grudgingly. "The fun I'm having right now is meaningful, you know. We talked about this." 

It's also bound to cause horrific pain to the people that Itadori endears himself to, she thinks but doesn't say. He'll leave an indelible mark on them, and who knows if for better or worse. That hedgehog dilemma boy and nail girl will probably come out stronger for it, but— there are bound to be people who will be made worse.

Who will think that this filthy world couldn't even tolerate a person like Itadori, that the world of sorcerers condemned him for it despite it not being a problem, and that it should probably burn for such a sin. 

Itadori lived in that story she read a lifetime ago, but in this filthy world, survival is never a guarantee. Not even if she's sure that Cotton Swab will do his best, if just because he's taken responsibility for the kid and can't tolerate failure.

"Don't repeat it to me," Sukuna says, rolling her eyes. "It's not that I don't see it, it's that I don't care." Turning her attention to Cotton Swab, she adds, "That's four meals. Of good quality." 

"Of course, of course," he says cheerfully enough. "Now, let's do it! Name! That! Curse!" 

He really does it like a game show, revealing the first hanging scroll with a flourish. Sukuna glances at it, quickly deciphering the artist's intent. The art of that time tended to be a mix of simplistic people and horrific monsters, which usually lent itself to rendering Sukuna in interesting ways. 

"Imaginary Curse," Sukuna says. She'd taken a rather horrific injury to her face at one point, though thankfully her little knowledge of modern medicine had led to a complete recovery. Otherwise, there's a good chance that she would have lost two of her eyes and would have had to graft something on. 

"What do you mean?" Itadori asks, sitting straighter. 

"Despite the sorcerers' best efforts," Cotton Swab says, "the separation between 'regular' people and sorcerers wasn't very large back then; that's why we have so many legends these days. When people hear tales, and get scared, that can create a curse to fulfill the story. A man-eating tiger, for example, can spawn a monstrous curse!" 

"Those filth put my image out there, warning the masses of my terrible deeds," Sukuna agrees, disdain and mockery dripping from her words. "Naturally, there were curses shaped in my image." 

"Well, they were trying to hunt you down, so getting news out was important," Cotton Swab says lightly, although there's something sharp and cruel there. 

Whether aimed at her, or the Clans back then, it really doesn't matter. 

A few more scrolls painted with the likeliness of imaginary spirits go by before the next one catches her attention. She would almost say that this, too, is an imaginary spirit, but— 

"Hmm? Real or fake? Hmm? Hmm?" Cotton Swab goads, playing with the display board, rocking it back and forth with a manic tone. 

"It's the only one with an eye in the forehead," Sukuna says at last, glancing at him, "And four legs. What do you think? Don't mix in weird things." 

The next one is just another imaginary curse, but the final image is a complete painting. A misshapen hulk of a man stands next to a fish-pond, pinching a mudra with one hand while the other directs a cursed fish spirit out of it. A third hand hangs out of the front of the ill-fitting kimono, the expression calm with nearly-shut eyes. Compared to the cartoonishly grotesque expressions of the other paintings, this one— probably should have been destroyed a long time ago. 

"That one's accurate," she says, flat and disinterested. 

"Whoa, really?" Itadori exclaims. "But it looks nothing like you?"

Children are so exhausting. Sukuna isn't going to get into the whole thing with him, especially not in front of Cotton Swab. "If I said it's accurate, it's accurate," she says. Then, because she's been thinking about it, she adds: "Being a cursed object means my soul no longer needs to conform to my container. Incarnations can look just like their Vessel, but they also have the ability to force their own appearance onto it. Sometimes it's better to hide, so they don't - sometimes they use a familiar face to play on their target's emotions. You can't always trust your eyes when it comes to these things." 

"I see," Itadori says thoughtfully, "so I should… trust my heart!" 

She's speechless for a second, then looks pointedly at Cotton Swab. Hey, your student is doing a shonen protagonist impression in a horror genre! Get control of him! But Cotton Swab is just standing there, drumming his fingers on the board the scroll is pinned open to, with a distracted little smile on his face. 

It's really seven lifetimes of bad luck. 

"Well," he says at last, "What about all those records of massacres? Are you saying that was also those imaginary curses?" 

Sukuna abruptly realizes the whole point of this. That Cotton Swab suspects that she's trying to play on Itadori's emotions - to make herself seem like a harmless, misunderstood victim of circumstances. To cast doubts on the execution order, thus making Itadori unsure of who and what to trust, isolating him so that she can control him. 

To him, it's a very rational concern. 

For Sukuna, she's already performed so many dog tricks that a false sensory-memory imposes on her: biting down on scarless skin, mouth aflood with hot liquid. Or better yet, striping that skin and skewing it to grill until sticky and chewy. Paired with a blood soup and meat cut so thin it cooks in the steaming broth like hotpot. Thin sliced sashimi-style liver, since the bastard is unlikely to drink. 

"Boy," she says, turning her attention back to the Vessel, "I remember there's a dish called gyutan, right?" 

"Ah, right," Itadori says, startled. "Grilled beef tongue, I think?"

Sukuna hums thoughtfully. "I'll remember that. And tuna eyeballs. I hear they're also popular when grilled." The idea of grilling a set of blue eyes makes her mouth water and her teeth feel a little itchy so that she idly runs her tongue over the sharp edges of them. 

Itadori's stomach rumbles loudly in the silence, startling him and bringing Cotton Swab to sharp attention, having long since lost his smile. 

Tired of this endless bullshit and these noisy little brats, Sukuna withdraws. Her domain has a much cleaner atmosphere.

-0-

Of course her Vessel is inexperienced, not stupid, so as soon as it's nighttime and he's retreated to his dorm and gotten ready for bed, he has to follow up on the Cotton Swab's hints. 

Why he always has to pick disturbing topics right as he's trying to sleep, Sukuna doesn't know. It can't be good for his nightmares, which she's vaguely aware of though has had no part in affecting. The fact that she could is an unhappy little discovery, but Sukuna doesn't worry much about things that happened in the Story. It's not real, anyway. 

Itadori flops into bed, pulls up the covers to his chin, and then says, "Sukuna, what happened back then?"

"The massacres?" she asks, disinterested in talking in circles or being coy. "There were several, for different reasons. Were they good reasons? What would be a 'good' reason, anyway? I determined they should die and so they did. Justifying it is what the weak do."

The hunger that had been provoked earlier digs its claws in, sharpened with annoyance: the itching desire to bite and devour. Tangles together with the endless, irksome whys, and spills forth from her mouth: "those self-righteous fools wasted my time. And the most tiresome one, that one with the cursed energy eradicating technique, was so caught up in her own head that she fell, too." 

Sukuna remembers the swirling, simmering incredulous rage of it all, that this insignificant little self-important sorcerer had such a power and chose to crusade against her. Sukuna cut a bloody swath through Japan, destroyed armies, cities, entire clans - but none of it had ever been a senseless rampage. Excessive in some aspects. Vengeful, naturally. But never pointless. 

"I ripped that sorcerer to pieces with my hands," she says, teeth aching with the need to rip and tear. "And I ate them then and there. Fresh blood and skin and bone, all." She sighs, regretful. "Normally I prefer my meat cooked - less diseases that way. But just ripping her to pieces wasn't enough, I—"

It isn't a hand silencing her, but a fist. Sukuna isn't a punching bag and has no need to trick Itadori by being easy to fight, so she merely bolsters her manifestation with cursed energy and allows his hit to land, if not cause any appreciable damage. 

Were this anyone other than her nephew, she'd have sliced his arm off at the wrists. She wonders if he remembers she could. He let her. 

The boy is a writhing mess of rejection and horror. Just from words, she thinks; not even action. Not even memory. He cringes from the mere concept of such violence when he's already so good at it. It horrifies him. He denies it. 

He can not yet fathom the amount of hatred required to rip a person to literal pieces and then devour them. He would have, in the Story. She doesn't remember how or where or what, but she remembers that. 

There was a rabbit in the snow, she thinks. 

She doesn't know what this life will require of him, but she thinks it's better to break something all at once and then piece it together into a form stronger than before - to shatter, and then to recover, to heal, to learn how to live again. Better to know what you're capable of, in case it's necessary, than to be helpless and get broken when you can least afford it. Like ripping off a bandaid, getting it all over and done with at once instead of death by a thousand cuts.

The world will not care that Itadori treasures the small pleasures of life, the little memories. It wants to kill him, and he just stupidly reaches out to hug it. 

If this were a Story, Sukuna thinks, this would be the moment her blood-covered self would be baffled but moved by such kindness; a ray of light in the dark. 

This is not a Story, so Sukuna is just very tired.

"Why would you say that," Itadori finally says, his palms ground into his eyes. Much like he had that time she'd left him in her domain while she took care of that Fingerbearer. As if he wants to claw the memory or his heart out of his face, dig his fingers in a rip and pull. 

"Because I am not a maligned or misguided victim who has been persecuted by those in power," she says. "I don't need your pity, and you can not shape me into an idealized form to make yourself at ease with my presence." 

Itadori breathes, sucking air through gritted teeth - and then the tension goes out of his body all at once, sagging into the bed and lowering his elbows, rubbing his face like a small child scrubbing away their own tears. There are no tears, of course - her eye is set so close to his, she could hardly miss them. 

There is more she could say, given this world, given Itadori's place in it, but - at last she relents. 

Itadori, as a teenage orphan, would have been running a household in her era. In this modern era, he's still a child to be looked after. Sukuna thinks it's hilariously misguided not to give him the information or skills he needs to survive his situation, but given Cotton Swab's overbearing ego, she can't be surprised. What does he think he is? God? Because none of the people who can get past his Limitless have tried? 

Exhausting. 

But some people just have to let the wax melt and plunge into the ocean. They won't learn, they only crash and die and become parables about the folly of man.

Forget it. 

Didn't she also fly? Didn't she also burn.

Sighing again, Sukuna relents further. "A bedtime story," she says, trying to think of something that happened back then that would be palatable to modern sensibilities. "Right. In this era, it's a bit unusual for curses to be intelligent enough to converse, but back then-"

As she speaks of discovering the hidden community of curses that wanted to build their own country separate of that where the humans and sorcerers live, Itadori lowers his arms and finally his hands as well. She does not speak of the kidnappings or the night markets, tales of which have survive to this era in both sorcerer warnings and mundane folklore. Instead she focuses on the funny little dramas and arguments that arose between the curses that wanted to mimic human life more, and those that saw no reason for it.

She does not speak of the mock-trials that frequently ended in the inhuman curse's favor. She does not relate how determined the curses were to devour her as a human sorcerer, and instead tells now she became employed in solving their bickering differences - how they had little fights and mysteries not unlike the human world.

It is, perhaps, the wrong kind of story to tell someone in this era where curses are little more than ravening beasts. It's still the kindest one she has, so it'll have to do.

Notes:

Yuuji: No, we like sensei! He's why we're alive right now!
Sukuna: No, we specifically hate him for that reason, it's so much easier being dead

No trauma like generational trauma!
In this fic, we eat deus ex machina :V
isekai bastards abusing the shit out of not!disclosure would definitely happen. They'd be running around blabbing about people's domains and techniques and pissing EVERYONE off. Doing so has become a huge taboo!
Sikuna says 'time freeze' but that's just how she understood that guy's limitless, it actually did something weirder.

kawa yakitori - grilled chicken skin; maguro no medama - tuna eyeballs; motsunabe - offal hotpot, usually with intestine; several cultures have blood soup, but I didn't find a specifically japanese version. Gyutan is specifically from sendai, which is why Sikuna mentions it.

Chapter 8

Yuuji doesn't get very good sleep in the following days, though at least watching movies is a good way of distracting himself from the fact that he has a devil in his stomach. Second stomach, whatever. 

If nothing else, sensei's movie choices are - illuminating. 

It's all these twisted psychological horror movies - well, not all, some are probably categorized as romantic comedies, but when Yuuji is watching psychological thrillers, the characterization choices are… uh. And the relationship development milestones - yeah. No. 

Yuuji used to veg out in front of a game or an anime or movie and just… let himself coast. Turn off his brain and just enjoy the explosions. 

He hasn't, recently. Initially because every moment he has is precious with his execution looming over his head. Although there haven't been Fingers since, the fact that he'd eaten the first one and the second one came so fast that it had kind of given the impression that he'd be lucky to live a few years. 

Two years sounds like a long time, especially when you're fifteen, but a month in and Yuuji realizes that the deadline changed from twenty-four to twenty-three and he… a kind of drumming anxiety started up. 

It's kind of why he's gotten so pushy with Sukuna, especially now when she sits, silent and still as a stone, in his chest. 

It's important that he understands his situation.

That's why he thinks that sensei's movie choices are illuminating, in a way sensei probably doesn't expect. A few days in and Yuuji can predict the theme beats, the trope placement, sometimes even lines. He's always been really good at pattern recognition, which is why he's not very interested in video games much. Movies at least recognize when a trope has been done to death and needs a plot twist, even if it makes no sense. 

So sensei gives him all these movies about people manipulating each other, even if it's not always for bad reasons, and understands that sensei is trying to tell him to be careful of Sukuna, that Sukuna can't be trusted. 

He probably thinks that Yuuji wouldn't listen if he said it directly? That whole teen rebellion thing? But come on! Yuuji is a good kid, you know! How unfair to think he's not going to listen! He likes sensei, and even if sensei plays tricks on him, even Yuuji can tell that sensei wouldn't do something for no reason. 

But uh, those movies just highlight how much manipulation Sukuna very much isn't doing. 

Oh, she clearly doesn't tell him everything, but sensei doesn't either so he can't really assign any kind of malicious intent to it. Yuuji has kind of gone out of his way not to bother thinking about things too deeply in his life, to just live in the moment, but he can understand why Sukuna says that won't cut it.

Gojo-sensei, unknowingly, agrees. 

He sees less of Gojo-sensei than he'd like, but it's been like that since school started. He sees him often enough to posit the hints that Sukuna drops to him, and Gojo-sensei will almost always agree and expand the concept. Phrasing it like 'psychological warfare' had obviously tickled sensei, but he'd certainly offered a litany of other places where it provided a personal boost: card games like poker, or childish dares and haunted houses - fake ones, of course. Fist fights in alleys. 

Yuuji kind of wishes Sukuna were less straightforward about all the murdering, though. 

At least if he doesn't ask, she doesn't say it. He just doesn't always know what she takes as asking, so sometimes the conversation still takes a rude turn. The weird thing is that Sukuna never feels happy about the murders, which is what Yuuji expected when dealing with an ancient evil spirit. He expected her to - gloat, maybe. Like a villain in a movie. 

Sukuna just feels resentful every time the topic comes up. 

The calmest and most engaged she'd been was telling him about the cursed spirits in her era. King of Curses, this era calls her, and for the first time Yuuji really wonders about it. 

-0-

Maki is the sensible, responsible one with a no-nonsense attitude, so she's the one that frankly informs Yuuji that the Kyoto students won't only know about Yuuji being Sukuna's Vessel - pretty much the whole Jujutsu world knows, which while understandable, feels kind of weird - but they may try assassinating him. 

Yuuji thinks it's kind of fucked up that people his age are killing people.

Actually he feels really strongly about that - not for his own sake, he's long agreed to his execution, but what that means for them. What it means about the Jujutsu world. He can hold Sukuna back… probably. He's never actually had to fight for control of the body. 

The point is, they can send assassins, but to use students to do it… 

Yuuji's gaze droops down, the sneering echo of Sukuna saying this filthy world in his ears. 

It should be noted that he doesn't agree, and even this doesn't make him agree. There are good things - Grandpa taught him all about them. It's sunlight in the leaves and butterflies in the flowers and ice cream in summer and hot cocoa in winter and 'thank you' for shoveling snow and holding open doors and dropping things only for a stranger to stop and pick them up. 

It's the leaves changing colors and stray kittens being rescued and people banding together to rescue an elephant stuck in a hole. Taking in orphaned animals and spontaneous compliments and doctors and firemen and—

There's a lot of good, of altruism, in the world. It's not all shit. 

Though he's starting to think that being a Jujutsu sorcerer who runs around fighting curses born of humanity's ills makes it easy to forget that. 

Things are better now. But he can see why Sukuna sees it all as filth. 

Yuuji punches his fist into his hand. "I need to take Sukuna on a spa day," he decides. 

Kugisaki and Fushiguro look at him with a mixture of shock and disgust. 

Ever since they've known that Kyoto Tech is coming, Yuuji hasn't spent much time alone. The second and first years are kind of sharing custody of him for now, though at the moment they're on break from training. As important as Yuuji's cursed energy control is, he can't slack on actual fighting tactics. The way Jujutsu sorcerers fight is a lot different than back alley scuffles, after all. 

"If anyone's having a spa day, it's me, " Kugisaki says with a sneer that isn't necessarily unkind, "how would you even have a spa day with the evil spirit possessing you?" 

" Why would you," Fushiguro wants to know, looking faintly stressed by the idea. He's actually come face-to-face with Sukuna, though, so Yuuji gets it. 

Kugisaki, however, is warming up to the idea. "Wouldn't that just be your body anyway? Let's make a day of it! I bet we can justify it to sensei as a mental wellness thing and charge it against the school!" She starts pointing and wagging her finger. "It's very stressful holding back an evil spirit! And it's stressful for us being around it! They should be grateful and give us a break!" 

"That's not how the higher ups work," Fushiguro says. 

"Well, they should." 

Actually, Kugisaki probably has a point. Yuuji wants to ask Gojo-sensei about what kind of benefits they get as sorcerers. Granted, Yuuji has only been on two missions, but he can't imagine that fighting curses all the time is good for anyone's worldview. Gojo-sensei is so often gone on missions that Yuuji hopes that he's getting hazard pay or vacation time or something for it. 

Yuuji opens his mouth to expand on why he thinks Sukuna needs to experience the nice things available in the modern day when he hears footsteps. 

"Well, well, well. If it's not the Vessel itself. Or should I say - a half-curse monster." 

Yuuji only barely turns to see the two strangers - a boy and a girl around their age - when Sukuna manifests on his face. "Oh, is that so?" she asks with the same, cloying malicious tone as her laugh when facing that Mt. Fuji curse. "Your Kyoto technical school… sure has a poor opinion of Tengen, huh - considering that bastard's finally 'evolved'!" 

The girl's condescending smirk tightens, turning down at the corners. "Don't compare yourself to Master Tengen, curse," she says darkly. 

"Who's comparing?" Sukuna drawls. "Did or didn't Tengen completely incarnate rather than pass to a new Vessel? After nearly two thousand years, I wouldn't be surprised she's tired of being part of such filth." 

"Okay, alright, can't you be nicer?" Yuuji mutters, poking his cheek with a finger until Sukuna retreats. "Who is Tengen anyway?" 

"You don't even know who Tengen is! And you call yourself a sorcerer," the girl mocks. 

"Cut it out, Mai," the towering hooligan next to her says, looking bored. "I just want to know if there's a worthy replacement for Okkotsu. You! Fushiguro, right? And you're that Vessel guy. What's your type? I'm talking about women, of course." 

Having asked, the guy proceeds to rip his shirt in half from the neck. 

Yuuji's impressed. He's never struggled with ripping through the collar of a t-shirt, but he and a few other guys in middle school had gotten into a contest about it and apparently t-shirt collars are tougher than they look. 

He's not sure what to make of the weird feeling that bubbles up from his second stomach where Sukuna rests, though. He doesn't think he's ever felt Sukuna approve of anything before, but that's the best way he can think to describe it, so he—

"No way," he says, turning away to whisper quietly, despite the fact he could do this silently. "Your type is… that?" 

Sukuna is so offended she immediately manifests again. "Do not insult me," she says. 

In the meantime, that guy was rambling about Okkotsu still, and Fushiguro is covering for Yuuji's lapse, pointing out that it's a weird topic starter. Yuuji wonders if he's a shut-in. He's gotten the feeling that Fushiguro really doesn't get out much and is probably very shy in general, because talking about hot girls is a pretty standard way for guys to get to know each other. 

"Then what was all that about?" Yuuji mutters to Sukuna. "It kinda felt like you liked him."

"A child?" she points out skeptically.

Todo Aoi is introducing himself as a third year, which means- "He's eighteen. That's legal, right?" 

Sukuna is speechless for a moment. "I still consider that teacher of yours a little brat. Can you not be so disgusting? The appearance you've seen is related to your own minuscule age." 

There's no time to pursue the conversation when Todo Aoi suddenly enters their personal space and clotheslines Fushiguro despite Fushiguro having stood still. "And you," he says, turning with his fist raised. 

The blow is so stupidly powerful that Yuuji skids back and staggers, feeling a little like his arms are about to be ripped off. Just from blocking it! His body shakes as he squares up, taking in a stabilizing breath and thankful that Todo hadn't followed up on it. 

In a real fight, sanctioned by the school, he would have. 

"What's your type," Todo asks, looking down his nose. 

"You can ask anyone you like," Kugisaki snarls, struggling against the hold Mai has her in. "That idiot introduces himself as a fan of Jennifer Lawrence!" 

Todo frowns faintly. "Who?" 

Yuuji regroups, sensing Fushiguro coming up on his left. "Hey," he barks, going for a thuggish posture, pointing so that it looks like 'up yours' - "I don't have time for a loser that doesn't even know who Jennifer Lawrence is!" 

It provides just enough of a distraction for Fushiguro to summon his shikigami - frogs with wings, this time, apparently. With it being three on two, the fight definitely should have been less one-sided - but unfortunately, even with Fushiguro padding their numbers, Yuuji and the other two were getting badly beaten. 

Yuuji catches up just as Todo surplexes Fushiguro, barely getting there in time to engage Todo so Fushiguro can recover. The winged frogs try catching Todo in a hold with their tongues, but Todo simply gives a kick, and the frog restraining his leg slams into Yuuji with enough force to nearly knock him flying back.

"You're a bit tougher than this guy," Todo says. "Come! Enlighten me on your 'Jennifer Lawrence!'" 

— is Yuuji supposed to admit that Mystique in the X-man films was his sexual awakening in front of two girls?! He could admit it shamelessly if it were just the three of them, but Grandpa raised him better than that! 

"Um - well. Isn't it because she's tall and built like this?" he says, etching a shape into the air. 

Todo pauses. 

From that second stomach suddenly comes a weird sensation like something turning over. Yuuji stays on guard as best as he can while feeling a little embarrassed, like he's said something inappropriate in front of his primary school teacher. 

"I see… that's right, I remember now…"

Yuuji blinks, exchanging confused looks with Fushiguro. There's blood leaking down his classmate's face, but the standoff continues a bit longer; Yuuji remembers that night on top of the school, Fushiguro had taken a blow to the head so bad that it had thrown off his summoning. He hopes that the stalemate continues long enough. 

"We have long since been friends!"

Huh?!

"If you're getting along then, knock it off," Panda announces, cutting through the weird atmosphere. Inumaki stops by Fushiguro, helping him up off the floor while Maki breaks up the fight between Mai and Kugisaki. 

"This seriously isn't the place to be fighting anyway," Panda continues, jerking a claw to the side. "If you break the vending machines, we'll bill you." 

"I'm just getting to know my opponents," Todo says, casually mopping his face dry. "Anyway, Okkotsu better show up. Even together, these guys can't fit between my teeth." 

Also, apparently Todo's favorite idol Takada had a meet and greet in Tokyo. Having missed out once, Todo was unwilling to miss out a second time, and Mai definitely couldn't face off against all six Tokyo Tech students by herself. 

"Is that guy for real?" Yuuji asks, turning to Panda for answers. 

"Unfortunately," Panda says. "Forget it. At least you got a measure of him, but you'll need to do a lot more training before it's actually time for the Meet." 

"Yeah," he agrees, straightening and rubbing his hand through his hair. So far, he's been able to skate by with the innate strength of his body, but just one of Todo's punches made all his bones feel fit to shatter. Those two were just fellow students - not even the assassins they were worried were lined up for Yuuji in the dark - and Yuuji couldn't even team up with Fushiguro and defeat them. 

Sukuna was right. He needs to get stronger. 

-0-

They'd gone back to training after the Kyoto students were taken over by some of the managers that worked at the school, guaranteeing them uninterrupted and unspied upon practice, but that night they have a joint dinner with which to discuss the Meet in more practical terms than before. 

One of the topics that came up was Tengen, and that Sukuna had been the one to mention Tengen. The second years were able to shed more light on the subject - it wasn't exactly widely known, but on campus, it was kind of an open secret that about twelve years ago, Tokyo Tech had been in charge of guarding Tengen's new Vessel and failed, causing Tengen to 'evolve'. 

Thankfully, Tengen had retained their human priorities and continued to guard the Jujutsu world, keeping it separate from the mundane human world. 

The whole subject gave Yuuji a bit of a headache. 

"Don't think about it too hard," Sukuna advises him once they're in his room. "Jujutsu was much wilder back then than it is now. Some bloodline techniques weren't quite as solidified, and unique mutations like Tengen showed up. It's just that most of them died without a sound." 

"I just don't know how to feel about it," he says, going to the bathroom. "I mean, I guess if I were a Vessel, I would do the same, but… I just don't know if it's right for Tengen or anyone else to ask them to do that. Do the Vessels even get a choice? Even if it only happens every five hundred years…" 

Sukuna's red eyes watch him in the mirror. It's always been a little strange to see both eyes open with a mouth under only one of them - if he turns his head, it looks a bit like a small cyclops face on his, but looking at his reflection head-on is disorienting. It's uneven. Strange.

There is no answer forthcoming. Yuuji isn't sure he really wants one, considering the kinds of things she's prone to saying. She leaves him alone while he brushes his teeth and washes his face, finally changing into sleepwear and shuffling over to the bed.

He can't seem to get comfortable, tossing and turning and fluffing his pillow before finally giving up and reaching out to Sukuna. Whether he'll be happy to hear what she has to say or not, he's not sleeping anyway. 

"What even is a Vessel," he asks, staring at the ceiling. "I guess I get why people might become a cursed object with the goal of incarnating later, but why are some people born Vessels?" 

"Why does anything happen?"

Yuuji clutches his covers, straining his eye toward the side of his face Sukuna is on. "Do you have to always answer my questions with a question?"

Sukuna clicks her tongue. "You can try thinking about it yourself," she says. "I remind you I had no teachers of my own. I fought and scraped for my knowledge."

"But if we wait for me to figure it out, we'll be waiting forever," Yuuji points out reasonably. He's not dumb, and he knows that, but he's not really clever - not in the way of becoming the strongest sorcerer a thousand years ago. 

Sukuna seems to consider that for a moment before sighing. "To answer your question, for people like you and Tengen's Vessels, it's a kind of 'fate' you're born with. Rather like an innate Jujutsu technique. If you become a sorcerer, it shapes your life and informs how you interact with the world. But capacity does not equate certainty."

"A kind of fate, huh. So I'm just… like some kind of human shaped glass? Like a bigger one than normal, so that you and I both fit in here." 

There's a kind of feeling from Sukuna as if she's heard someone try to say that apples are oranges. "No," she says at last. "First of all, souls don't have volume, as you should know. It's only been a short while, but by now you should have a clear concept of the boundaries between our souls."

"I should?" Yuuji echoes, stunned. He sits up, the blankets falling into his lap as he tries to turn his attention inward. How does someone turn their attention 'inward', anyway? There's nothing in there but his lungs and guts! "I don't think I do." 

Sukuna pauses for a moment, then says: "In a moment, I'm going to fight you for control of the body." 

Yuuji straightens slightly; not exactly on guard, but metaphorically setting his feet and squaring up. Nothing seems to happen for a moment, and then there's a strange flex, a throbbing like his heart pounding but it isn't his heart. A faint ringing in his ears. He leans forward, dropping his gaze to the bed as he suddenly becomes aware of a choking mass, a dense heaviness, a hundred thousand million sharp edges scraping stone. A black hole that churns between lung and heart, twisting, voracious and insatiable. 

Something else twists like a vice, clamping down on that thing and refusing its expansion. Yuuji has a strange certainty that Sukuna isn't fighting very hard, adjusting her efforts to match the resistance he's giving. It reminds him of being thirteen, locking hands with boys trying to shove each other off floor tiles - a modified sumo wrestling, really. Yuuji didn't often lose those games. 

He doesn't lose this one either. 

Slowly, the pressure dissipates. For a moment longer, Yuuji holds onto that feeling - but even with him still pushing from his side, he can't actually swallow Sukuna or suppress her further than their usual arrangement. 

Is it stifling there buried so deep inside his chest? He'd been stifled, after that skeleton hand had plucked him up and held him in its palm. 

It takes Yuuji a moment longer to remember to let off the pressure from his side so that Sukuna can manifest again.

"You see," she says when she does, "our souls overlap. Otherwise I'm sure that Cotton Swab would have used his sure-hit in his domain on me." She doesn't sound very worried about it, he notices. "But our situation is rather unique due to our 'fates'. For the standard incarnate, anyone with a weak enough will would do, and the act of incarnating is what turns that person into a 'vessel'. The original soul is suppressed, which may destroy the 'self', but even if it doesn't, a mark is left behind that makes such a person suitable for possession." 

"Why do you know so many upsetting things," Yuuji states, mostly. It's already terrible to have Sukuna stuck inside him, and he's starting to realize that she's actually very polite about possessing him. Apparently it's normally the other way around, and it's so terrible that - what? What does 'destroy the self' mean? That they just… die? Go into a coma? 

"There were a lot of upsetting things happening in the Heian Era," she says neutrally, and just that. There's a churning in his chest again, the kind of restless resentment that Sukuna has when talking about the massacres. 

Yuuji is grateful she didn't feel that he'd asked. 

"You should become more familiar with the shape of your soul," she continues. "It should be useful in the future." 

"Oh man, you don't think I'm going to have more hitchhikers, do you?" Yuuji asks, immediately landing on the most upsetting explanation possible. He has a special fate and is already agreeing to eat Sukuna's fingers before being executed. What if they use him as a cursed object disposal unit? 

"... not that I'm aware of?" Sukuna sounds disturbingly uncertain about this. "Don't worry," she adds more confidently, "if you do, I'll eat them." 

"Sukuna, no," he says, flopping back onto the bed and pulling his covers up. "Not unless they're really creepy." 

The feeling he gets is horribly ambivalent.

Notes:

Sukuna: [crunch crunch crunch]
Yuuji: What are you eating?
Sukuna: [crunchcrunchcrunch]
Yuuji: Sukuna, no!! Drop it!!!

I love Todo, I just can't do him justice
You gotta remember, Yuuji hasn't had the Mahito mission and hasn't trained with Gojo so he's underleveled~
Well so JL doesn't have a big butt IMO, but she did play Mystique, which... seems terribly in character for Yuuji and now I have a monsterfucker!Yuuji headcanon I have no idea what to do with.

Chapter 9

If there is one good thing about bumping into the Kyoto students, it's that Itadori really starts taking training seriously. If it takes this long for Itadori to approach his teacher and follow up on her hints about him being a Vessel and getting subjected to a bare-faced Cotton Swab for a bit — well, she could have done without the creep peering at her soul, but it could have been worse. 

Of course, the kid's teacher isn't a cursed object himself and doesn't specialize in souls, but the Six Eyes are rather powerful and there's a reason they're feared. 

"Admittedly, I haven't seen many Vessels fulfilling that function," he says, "but when I said you guys were completely merged, that's what it looks like. That's actually the argument I used with the higher ups, you know? Because normally killing the Vessel just traps the encroaching soul back in the cursed object. In your case, your souls fit together so that using seals to stick the soul in place should do the job."

"So what?" Itadori asks. "Does that mean Sukuna is right? Even if I die…?"

"Probably not without setbacks," he says. 

It's a bit of a relief that the brat is treating this subject and Itadori's concerns with the gravitas it requires. It'd be much easier to draw his own conclusions and blindly reassure the boy - but with Sukuna herself in the mix, saying things like this, Cotton Swab probably can't risk ruining his own credibility with his student.

"No matter what," he continues, "there's a level of synchronicity between a body and soul that were born together and grew together. Either way, Yuuji, we won't make it easy on Sukuna, okay?" 

There are steps that Sukuna could also take to make the Vessel that was born for her more accommodating - it's likely that the brain-case is counting on that. Sukuna doesn't presume that guy wouldn't know her history with family, and coupled with her notorious grudge holding, he must be certain that she'd do anything. It's all an effort to make a two-sided war into a war with three or four fronts in order to stretch the sorcerers' means far too thin to stop his plans. 

That annoying brain-case might have even been correct about that, if not for her frankly bizarre circumstances. 

Brain-case can't plan for what he doesn't know, and who could have predicted that Sukuna had future knowledge, specifically of this boy and his classmates? Though she's long since lost all the emotional attachment she had to her favorite characters and can't even remember names or stories consciously, she'd always had a good memory for stories. It's all there, locked away somewhere in her brain, just waiting for the right key to release the details.

Like Todo, who at least twice joined forces with Itadori to fight an overwhelming enemy, though which ones she couldn't say; the Goodwill event would be attacked, she remembered suddenly.

Though all that information had only come about after Todo ripped his shirt off. Apparently in her brain, a shirt was enough for that guy to pull a Clark Kent. 

Even more interesting than that was what happened a short while later: the first ripple of Shrine manifesting. 

It was good that Itadori was finally taking his training seriously enough to hassle his teacher into doing his job - Sukuna was interested in doing her own type of training with him also. 

-0-

Having that Six Eyes brat as his teacher may be the bad luck of seven lifetimes, but at least he isn't one to break his word, however little he likes it. As it is, late Sunday evening, one of the assistants hand delivers a nondescript box to him. Sukuna isn't even paying attention until he's already brought it back to his dorm and decides to get her input on the weirdness of the situation. 

"You brought a strange box back to your room?" Sukuna asks, staring down at the box he's holding in his hands. She rolls her eye up only to belatedly think of what a stupid thing that is - it's something she's always been slightly exasperated with Itadori for doing. It's like trying to look at her own nose. 

"What if it's dangerous?" he says. 

Yes, what if it was dangerous? Maybe those twenty minutes she healed him against that Special Grade taught him the wrong kind of lesson. 

Whatever, let his little friends slap him around when he upsets them with his lack of self-preservation. 

Itadori easily interprets her lack of response and attention shifting back to the box correctly. He carries it over to the study desk. "It's a little heavy," he comments. He ends up using a pen to break the seal on the box, pulling out a mess of paper and a plastic bag, in which is a hunk of something bloody. 

"Huh?"

"Ah," Sukuna utters. "That Cotton Swab remembered." 

"Gojo-sensei sent it?" Itadori asks, turning the bloody bag over to look at it better. 

Sukuna's mouth faintly waters. It won't be nearly as useful as the real deal, but it'll help. "For the deal we made to identify those paintings." 

"Haa?" He sounds like that nail girl, sighing in disbelief that way. " This is the good meal he promised? It isn't even cooked, and there's just meat!" He wilts a little in disappointment, going back to the box like there might be a secret four course dinner in there somewhere. There's just the cold pack the meat was shipped with. 

To be honest, Sukuna hadn't really thought this part out. Sitting on her Throne, her forearms resting on the armrest, her lower arms folded over her ribs. The sound of teeth grinding is rathr loud, a mockery of a growling stomach. Sighing, she leans over and rests her head on her knuckles.

"This is the bargain I made with him previously," she admits, eye tracking the bloody bag. "That there would be animal flesh on the table to… sate my appetites." 

Itadori pauses, lowering his hands a little and turning his head to look at the bag as well. They stare in silence at it for a while, moisture beading on the bag. Finally, Itadori lifts a hand to scratch his head. "Um… well, I can cook a little bit? Should I cook it?" 

"No cooking," she says sharply. 

He pauses again, but reaches over to pick it back up and turn it over, inspecting it. "Looks like beef," he says. "A pretty expensive cut, too. You sure…?" 

"If a medium rare steak would do, it'd be fine to get that brat to treat you to dinner again," she says testily. "No need to perform so many tricks. " 

"Oh," Itadori says. There's an odd, complicated feeling from him. "Uh. Then should I…?"

"Let me do it," she says. "This was the bribe not to indulge myself, after all." 

It's such a sanitized experience to cut a chilled steak out of a bag. When Sukuna ate her food raw, it was always fresh. There was little pleasure in killing animals once she became proficient with sorcery, but the slaughter was different. What was intended to become food for her table deserved care - honor. 

This pre-slaughtered flesh doesn't even deserve the care of the hastily devoured enemies on the battlefield that were more a matter of venting than hunger. 

But this isn't her body and she has a passenger, so Sukuna can only handle this with as much dignity as possible. The box is taken apart to serve as a placemat, the paper on top of it and finally the cold pack. A sharpened nail rips the plastic bag open, the smell of blood and raw meat flooding her mouth with saliva. 

"We only have the one body between us," she says as she rips the plastic bag so that it will continue to contain the blood but not hinder her consumption. Laying it over the cold pack, it's the work of an instant for her cursed energy to slice the meat into thin wafers that only the sharpest of chef's blades could match. "If you throw a hundred punches, but I perform a thousand slashes, the body will perform the slash more readily." 

Oh, cool, Itadori enthuses. Does that mean you could teach me your fighting style? Although I guess I only have two arms, so maybe I wouldn't be very good at it.

Pausing thoughtfully, Sukuna turns to take the body to wash its hands - thoroughly. When she'd sealed the boy in her own domain, it had given her some measure of control over his awareness of the outside world. Now that she hadn't pulled his soul into her domain during the moment where it was pried loose from its shell, Itadori should be residing in what is a nascent domain of his own. 

"Perhaps not my fighting style," she says. "That is strictly dependent on my physique, and something I wouldn't be able to replicate without fully incarnating and overwriting the soul's information on the flesh I'm occupying." 

Aw man, he says, almost sounding honestly disappointed. What about your human transfiguration technique?

Arching her brows as she returns to her meal at his study desk, Sukuna remembers the boy being rather obsessed with 'two of everything.' Plucking up a slice of raw beef, she stuffs it into her mouth, pausing for a moment to savor the texture and flavor.

It really loses something not being blood-warm. It loses something further that she lacks chopsticks and some kind of dipping sauce. But biting into raw flesh, even cut so thin, does slightly relieve the nagging ache in her gums even as it sharpens her hunger. 

Taking a moment to assess the body even as she savors her meal, Sukuna frowns a little bit. She'd half suspected for some reason that Itadori had been born with one of the Fingers as part of his body, but - that's not quite right. Although this body is terribly suited to her soul - their fates mirror one another to an incredible degree, to the point that Sukuna should be tempted to put out the effort to subdue the soul and take this Vessel as her new body - it's not because of any echo of her power within it. 

"I could possibly grow a second set of arms," she muses, "but the changes it would require in your physiology make it a poor idea at best. Your brute strength would be split between them for some time, and it would be longer before you could make use of the second set, no matter how much muscle memory I built."

I see, he says seriously. But master! What about the golden ideal?!

Noisily, his unspoken words ring like someone frantically beating a temple gong. 

Speechless, Sukuna sucks the blood off the body's fingers. It is just a tube of flesh and blood, she thinks, and requires zero muscle memory, so theoretically, she could do it. She'd been rather obsessed with the notion of body modification, although by the time she learned enough to do it, she'd ultimately chosen against it. 

By that time, she'd been too famous, and therefore in too much danger. Her notoriety had become a boon, and she couldn't risk being vulnerable for the length of time it would take to do and adjust to the modifications. Thus, she'd spent the final years of her life reluctantly accepting the body that she'd been born into. 

"Boy," she says finally, "are you gay?" 

Itadori is successfully stunned into silence. 

"At least in my experience," she adds, "women don't actually find large penises appealing, and having two is downright terrifying. So it can't be that you want to impress a woman." Actually, given the boy's social development, it's possible he has no partner in mind at all. No practical thought given to what he'd do with them or where she should place the new one. "Your hips are a little narrow for the configuration I was born with," she adds, "but stacking one atop the other causes problems with the placement of the testes." 

There's a bizarre little jolt, a shudder, and a sudden tumultuous surge of mortification that silences her in shock. No. I'm sorry - Aneki, I'm begging forgiveness! Please forget I ever brought it up!

A bit bewildered as to why he now feels like this is an embarrassing subject when he'd brought it up multiple times before, Sukuna pauses in the middle of cleaning up the trash. "Not 'aneki'," she says. "If you have to call me anything, it should be 'obaasama.'" 

No way, Itadori says, strong enough for the impression of him making his arms into an 'x' sign to come through. The old lady left ages ago! Even if you're a thousand years old, it's too weird to think of you as my grandpa's generation.

The irony.

"You understand you're placing the King of Curses in your own generation," she says. 

Evil spectres without their own bodies aren't given the respect due to elders, Itadori says matter of factly.

That's— well, whatever. Since she has no interest in making the bullseye on Itadori larger by admitting their connection, she should forget getting the respect that an ancestor deserves. 

Suddenly, her head lifts and turns. Waiting for a moment to verify the faint sensation, she clicks her tongue. Three fingers is really a level of weakness she hasn't had to face in a long time - she should have been able to sense that malicious intent long before now.

"Boy," she says, slowly grinning. "Those elders finally got impatient. It's barely a week after their first attempt, and they've sent another. One that dares attack at the school!" 

Having stepped out of Itadori's dorm to dispose of the bloody trash, Sukuna turns her head to glance at the other dorm rooms. This assassin should be the evasive type - a real assassin, so to speak, or otherwise they'd never dare infiltrate the school. 

Although she's not certain how Tengen's barriers work these days since back then, it would take a sorcerer to lead a non-sorcerer through, of which what they call 'windows' would count as - there's the possibility that this assassin has some kind of official excuse. 

So what, the boy can get in trouble for attacking someone when he defends himself? That sounds about right for those wretches. 

How do you know there's an assassin, Itadori asks, a little stunned. He instinctively shifts toward taking control of the body, and as much as Sukuna wants to push him down, she can't and recently she's been teaching him to fight back against her, so trying will just activate a trained response to retake the body faster. 

At the height of my power, I could sense malicious intent within two hundred meters, she says with a bit of a snarl, the body in an odd state of flux that leaves them entirely too vulnerable. Especially since her ability is restrained to her teenage level of about fifteen meters, which is far too close for comfort. Quickly calming herself, she adds: It's safest to lead them away from your classmates. Didn't you want to see my fighting style?

Itadori's pressure lets up almost immediately at the mention of his classmates. But I still only have two arms.

That's right, she agrees, stuffing the body's hands into the pockets, deliberately taking a relaxed posture. But I can still show you my evasion skills.  

Stopping by his dorm, Sukuna fits his sneakers back onto her feet. Unlike before, she allows herself to settle into the body, feeling the boundless youth and energy in it. She'd been well into her twenties before she'd managed to feed her monstrosity well enough to feel this good. Generous application of reversed curse technique had eventually allowed her to recover from a childhood of starvation. 

But Wasuke had taken good care of Itadori, whatever mixed feelings he may have had. There is still boundless potential tied up in bone and flesh and blood. 

To be honest, Fingerbearers are not the only curse that would find this Vessel a panacea. 

Sukuna restrains her presence. Those that know Itadori well would still be able to tell the difference, but a cursory glance from anyone else would fail to reveal anything. She has never been a simple teenage boy going out for an evening run, but Itadori has done it often enough that she can slowly smooth over the rough edges of her soul and slowly match the feeling of his own. 

Whoa, Itadori says, that feels weird. What are you doing?

Yawning casually as she trots out of the building, she replies, I told you souls don't have volume. What they do have is waves - just like water, just like light, just like sound. I'm changing mine to match yours more closely, so that our assassin isn't alerted - or anyone else for that matter.  

It feels weird, he says again, obviously unhappy. 

You only have to put up with it for a while, she reassures him, noting that the assassin did as expected and has followed. Good - she couldn't be sure they didn't have a secondary mission against the hedgehog dilemma boy. Whatever uncle wanted to take out the next Zenin heir didn't manage to interfere this time. It's actually not comfortable for me either.  

In fact, it's really the antithesis of being a strong jujutsu sorcerer. Most of Sukuna's closest calls with death happened when she bothered to empathize with someone - her nature is that no matter how much she understands someone, she does what is good for her. 

The ability to resonate with other souls is nothing but a big achilles heel for her.

But for Itadori? Well, that's something else entirely. 

It's really too lucky that Itadori has made a habit of evening runs recently. It's not every night, but honestly, he'd been intending to run this night if he hadn't been caught off guard by that manager bringing him some meat. An assassin showing up on the same night is almost enough to make Sukuna lose her temper entirely, but she'd already been prepared in case of poison. 

As much as she relishes the easy spring into motion as she launches herself into Itadori's usual pace, most of her attention is spent on adjusting to the two arms and lack of a second mouth to breathe with. Truthfully, being a singleton, Itadori's body doesn't have the boosted oxygen requirements that her body had, but with a sneaky little bastard trying to kill her, she needs to adjust as much as possible to the body. 

Even if Itadori could never actually tire his body out with a simple run, the path he takes does give their assassin ample opportunity for attack - several parts of it take them a fair distance from buildings, and even if there are patrols performed by various managers and assistants, right as twilight hits tends to be the quietest time. 

There were undoubtedly other measures taken, the gap likely a trap rather than a weakness, but it hardly matters. The assassin is cautious enough not to take the first two openings, but on the third, the sensation of malice mutes suddenly. The corner of Sukuna's mouth curls. 

The blow comes low and fast, aiming at the back of Itadori's knees. Sukuna drops, pivoting around the upward sweeping blow with one leg extended and slicing toward the back of the assassin's head. She very nearly succeeds in one blow, except that the assassin's technique allows them to drop back into the pool of shadow beneath their own body. 

Clicking her tongue, Sukuna stands smoothly. "It's been a while since I saw this," she says with a grin, idly clapping her hands. "Take note, boy. This a bloodline technique of the Zenin Clan. Their strongest bloodline technique is the Ten Shadows, of course, but there are a few variations that aren't bad. This one is called 'Seeping Shadows'." 

What? Like Fushiguro's shadow puppet technique? Itadori asks.

That - eh, forget it; she'll clue him in on his classmate's backstory some other time.

"The point is," she says, "the Zenin bloodline techniques tap into a spatial quality in shadows, using them as a gateway. Seeping Shadows links one shadow to another, allowing instantaneous transportation over short distances. Skillful users, like this one-" 

She bends, twisting and launching herself sideways before falling into a series of flips, avoiding the cursed tools flung at her out of the twilit darkness. The whole point of this exercise was to show off her evasion techniques, after all. They leave the path and plunge into the forest - normally a bad idea when fighting an assassin who can move between shadows, but - well. Seeping Shadows isn't exactly an easy technique to use. 

And despite being a fairly well-trained assassin, they couldn't have much cursed energy. 

The next several minutes are spent in a frantic cat-and-mouse — although it's more like rabbit-and-weasel. The assassin keeps trying to kill her, and she - well, she attracts his attacks and waits for the last second to twist out of the way, striking back with purely physical blows that never quite connect. Countless close calls, just-misses, drawing the fight out, drawing the assassin out, convincing them even as their energy flags that the next hit would surely land. 

It never does. 

"Ah," Sukuna says, feeling a flux of power. All four eyes open wide, lips aching from the tight stretch over so many sharp teeth. "The domain expansion!" 

The dark woods are swallowed by absolute blackness. It's like standing in a void without shape or direction. Word is that the Ten Shadow's domain is similar, but also altogether different. It'd be interesting to find out how different, especially since every manifestation of a technique is a bit different depending on the person suing them, as are the domains. 

This assassin isn't the first Seeping Shadows user she's fought. 

Let's see, Sukuna murmurs, dark and delighted, a heart strike? The throat or femoral arteries? No, they would have heard about maintaining the body so long, but not that I don't need the heart. Or something more risky… like decapitation?  

Can you not be so creepy? Itadori speaks up. That's my body, you know!

Well, there's a sure-hit coming up, she reasons, and I was wondering if the extra despair of surviving it would be worth it.

Forget it - what if it was some kind of cursed tool? The assassin had already thrown at least one at her, since they're here to exorcise a devil, better not to let the hit land. 

Just as well - when the blow comes, the assassin materializes almost on top of her, aiming a stab through the forehead. Sukuna twists, kicking straight up and letting the sure-hit land on the toe of Itadori's shoe. He yelps noisily in the space of their souls while she disarms the assassin with a pivot, driving her stiffened hand into the assassin's armpit. 

Then she grabs the assassin by their head and wrenches them free from the shadows, hurling them across the empty, ever-stretching void. The body hits the same not-surface she stands on, only once, before splashing and sinking like a skipping stone. 

Grinning, she says, "Come on, come on, work harder, okay? The last Seeping Shadows user I faced kept three thousand blades in his domain. Did you ever find his records? Though what a shame for your clan to throw you away like this. It's like they don't even recognize a good spy technique when one is handed to them!" 

What makes the Seeping Shadows domain such a pain in the ass is that there is no 'surface' from which the assassin will materialize - it's all shadows, and so an inch from her throat, the assassin can reach out and try slicing it. It's far from a problem for her, but trying to deal with it with no cursed energy or techniques or killing the assassin… tch. Sure is a way of dragging it out. 

Whether or not the taunt worked, for the next several moments that assassin attacks her from several bizarre angles, one handed since her blow had temporarily crippled one arm. It made only having two arms more than enough, in any case, despite the fact that in this domain, that assassin was probably just standing still and stabbing at the same spot despite where it emerged to stab her. 

Once again, a mistake is made, and Sukuna catches the assassin's wrist in her hand - over her shoulder, where they had been trying to stab into the back of her skull, where ear met jaw. Her hand tightens savagely, twisting, yanking. Bones snap, joints pop. Digging in her heels, she pivots, one clawed hand reaching up the length of the twisting, straining arm, grasping. There's nothing beyond the end of the arm, a strange place where reality warps, but she fumbles, reaching, and her claws catch.  

The domain begins to shatter.

It's not because of Sukuna.

Releasing the hand, Sukuna tilts her head just enough that one eye can spot that hedgehog dilemma boy breaking in, his hands held before him and ready to start forming any seal he needs in a split second. The domain continues to shatter to pieces, the assassin vanishing into the shadows of the forest, and Sukuna clicks her tongue and surrenders the body to Itadori.

If anyone is getting in trouble for being out and about when there are assassins, let it be him. 

-0-

A day and a half later, Cotton Swab introduces Itadori and his lot to some insurance saleman, and Sukuna has to wonder at the sudden thrum of tension that such an introduction inspires. 

Notes:

Megumi, suicidally breaking into a domain: I HATE THIS FAMILY!!!!
Yuuji: Yay~ we're a family~
Sukuna, staring into the camera:

TBH Nobara is much more likely to break into a domain, but I wanted to expose Megumi to some shadow-based domains to give him a better concept of his own :V
The smell of raw steaks really makes me hungry. Alas, parasites.
"Great Aunt" is also obaasama! Though Yuuji just thinks "grandmother" when she says it.

Chapter 10

Despite everything that's happened and everything that Yuuji has had to come to terms with since entering the world of Jujutsu, Yuuji finds that he really loves Jujutsu sorcerers. 

It's probably because the stakes are different in their world. Yuuji has been feeling strange and disconnected and disinterested in the world for years now. All his peers, and all his teachers - they're all kind of fake. Or worried about stuff that doesn't really matter? Maybe he gets that from Grandpa, who raised him all along knowing that something was going on, but ultimately helpless to do anything about it but for raising Yuuji as best as he can. To try raising him as a good person, because that was the only way he had of fighting back. 

Then contrast that against his peers and his teachers who are all so obsessed with appearances, with getting one over each other, Yuuji just… can't relate. 

He relates really well with Jujutsu sorcerers though. 

"Since both options are shit," Nanami Kento continues, "I chose the one that best suits me." 

"I just chose whatever would get me out of hell," Kugisaki says, although she's obviously on the same page as Yuuji. 

"You've met this guy before, huh," Yuuji mutters, leaning over to bump shoulders with Fushiguro. 

"What do you mean by that?" Fushiguro narrows his eyes in a way that suggests he understands exactly what Yuuji means by that. 

Nanami looks entirely fed up by the three of them cracking wise one after another, cutting Gojo-sensei a baleful glance before clapping his hands. Yuuji instinctively straightens at the loud crack, but Kugisaki sneers a little bit and pops her hip out. 

"Even if I don't approve of how things are run," Nanami continues, "I follow the rules - so: just because you're a vessel, doesn't mean you're jujutsu sorcerer material. That goes equally for all three of you," he adds, taking his glasses off for a second to pinch the bridge of his nose. "There's more to being a sorcerer than having a powerful technique, so until you three can prove it, you're just a bunch of troublesome children." 

Kugisaki clicks her tongue, but Fushiguro just looks annoyed, like he's heard this speech before. Yuuji thinks it's pretty rich, this guy calling them troublesome children when they've already faced near-death countless times. Their age was never going to save them, and disrespecting that - 

Well, if they're school kids, then they're school kids. 

"Okay! I'll work hard to show you what I've got," Yuuji proclaims, lifting a clenched fist. 

"I don't want to hear it," Nanami says bluntly.

"I'm not interested in proving myself to some random depressed adult," Kugisaki scoffs. "Forget it, potato-head. At some point he thought being a salary man was meaningful." She flicks her hair dismissively over her shoulder. "Being the coggiest of cogs, tch." 

"Yeah, forget it," Fushiguro says, glancing over. "Following the rules just means he'd support your immediate execution." 

Nanami sighs heavier than ever, massaging his nose like he'd like nothing more than to go home. Gojo-sensei is having a grand time, watching his student bully this guy he's found from somewhere to babysit them. 

Well, actually, the idea is to get Yuuji off school grounds until the Kyoto visitors leave. Yuuji is a bit safer from assassins on school grounds, but they're hoping a moving target will make things a bit more difficult. Secondly, Fushiguro wants an opportunity to work on his domain expansion, but he hasn't yet taken the step of imbuing a barrier with his technique - something Gojo-sensei seems to think only a rush of adrenaline will help with. 

Kugisaki is coming along because apparently she's pissed that Yuuji originally got to watch movies for training, and that Fushiguro didn't bring her with him when he decided to crash that assassination attempt a few days ago. No amount of pointing out that she's not here to be a good jujutsu sorcerer really dissuaded her. 

That had been enough to appeal to Gojo-sensei's weird idea of how the world should work, so here they are. Apparently giving this guy headaches, though Yuuji doesn't think sensei dislikes this guy - probably likes him too much, really. 

It's probably not a fun thing to be liked by Gojo-sensei unless you have something specifically wrong with you, like Yuuji does. 

Nanami shuffles them all off to a car for a ride out to their mission location, handing a folder over to Fushiguro and telling them to draw some conclusions. The most recent incident, which has elevated it to a problem for a mature jujutsu sorcerer to become involved, is a trio of murders. There are pictures included. 

What the hell, he directs inward. 

Sukuna, who has been a dark, heavy mass in the pit of his chest for a while now, stirs. He feels an eye slit open and take a glance at the picture; next to him, Fushiguro sensitively notices something and leans away, only to get elbowed by Kugisaki. Inside, Sukuna's presence grows more dense; heavier, with sharp edges. The domestic violence couple that went on vacation for a while have come back and their relationship is worse than ever. 

"This would have to be a curse user, wouldn't it?" Yuuji ventures, glancing at his classmates and then Nanami. 

"Not necessarily," Fushiguro says reluctantly, still eyeing Yuuji's face. "Some cursed spirits have unusual powers, even if they're rather flimsy and only get graded as a two or a one."

"Or it could be a tool of some sort," Kugisaki adds, pushing Fushiguro back over so she can take another look at the pictures. "There have been a few that have backlash like this." 

"Backlash, maybe," Fushiguro disagrees, "but those clothes are a high school uniform. Those aren't sorcerers or curse users. This is likely the intended result." 

So basically… they haven't figured out anything, huh. Yuuji kind of wants to prod Sukuna for an answer, but - eh, with Nanami having thrown down the gauntlet earlier, he doesn't really want to depend on her yet. If it gets dangerous, he'll see if she'll be willing to help out. 

Actually, Sukuna has been pretty good for a while now. Granted, Yuuji hasn't really been in danger recently, so she hasn't had another chance to bully him like in the detention center. He thinks it's a good sign that she's been wanting to eat things that aren't people, and fighting assassins. She'd had a lot of fun doing that. 

Too bad he's trying to prove something, so he can't let her out to fight whoever did those mutilations. 

"So high school students at a movie, during school hours," Kugisaki says. "Guess they should run that as a PSA, scare the kids straight." 

"Says here there's a witness," Fushiguro notes, glancing up at Nanami. "A teenager. Nothing else showed up on the film." 

"Curses don't show up on film," Yuuji points out. That's why they could claim whatever they wanted about the damage done to his school that night he swallowed the finger. He wonders if his senpai are still seeing curses. 

"There could also be other ways into the theater," Kugisaki points out, though not like she disagrees. "Either way, we'll know more when we get there. It's not like Windows can see residuals." 

Nanami leaves them to it, but Yuuji figures that's a good sign. He doesn't seem like the kind that praises people easily, so a lack of correction must mean they're on the right track. 

It doesn't take long to arrive at the location, but they do have to go up a lot of stairs to get to the scene of the crime. Of course the bodies have already been collected, but Kugisaki hisses the moment they reach the doorway. Having been filled in on what 'residuals' are by his classmates, Yuuji squints and concentrates for a moment before he figures out how to see what they're seeing. 

"That's crazy," he says, glancing down at their feet. "How come we're not leaving any?" 

"That's why Gojo-sensei's Six Eyes are so scary," Fushiguro says, glancing at him. "We can't see it, but he could. For us, something like summoning a shikigami should be enough." 

That… sounds like way too much to look at? Poor Gojo-sensei.

"So either a cursed spirit or a sorcerer - curse user, I mean," Yuuji muses, staring down at the carpet. The residuals are all just kind of strange splotches, instead of something useful like footsteps. "They don't have a camera in this hall?" 

"It's a shifty side of town," Nanami points out. 

Well, they did let school students skip without a care, so point. 

Although there are residuals out there in the hallway, Fushiguro still wants to scope out the crime scene, so they step into the theater to look it over. The bodies are long gone, of course, but it's easy to see where they were - the seats are all aglow with cursed energy (although, it's more like a black glow). 

"Gross," Kugisaki says, circling around behind the seats. "Look, it's all over the place here. So whatever it was struck from behind." 

Glancing past her, Fushiguro points out, "with it happening at the front of the theater, it makes sense that our witness got away safely." 

"Only one entrance," Yuuji calls back, having already walked a circle around the room. He doesn't notice a discarded weapon or anything, either; jujutsu sorcerers are probably less likely to drop their weapons than bad guys in the movies, but at least now he's checked. 

Propping her hands on her hips, Kugisaki looks at Nanami. "That's that, then. We should get going on that trail, before it fades." 

Nanami takes point when they leave and follow the residuals up the staircase. What they find on the roof at first seems like more of the same - a pair of cursed spirits, especially given the cursed energy they exude. Nanami instructs Fushiguro to face one and Yuuji and Kugisaki to face the other, but it isn't long before he's calling them off. Fushiguro has his opponent caught by a shikigami, which gives Nanami a chance to discover that their opponents aren't cursed spirits at all. 

-0-

Yuuji's head is aching and he feels like his own home has a domestic violence couple fighting inside it. The nonexistent ruckus is enough to make him grit his teeth. Doctor Ierie is confirming that those two were people, if people that had been mutilated to the point that they barely even counted anymore. 

Not physically, but in their heads. 

It's that classic zombie dilemma, isn't it? If contagion is a sure-thing, and your friend is bitten and they beg to be shot before they can turn - would you do it? When would you do it? When they asked? Or when they were sick beyond saving? And if you weren't there, if you found your friend after they'd long since turned, could you kill them? 

Yuuji glances at Fushiguro and Kugisaki and wonders - if they get attacked, if they get mutilated, what should he do? Could he, even having heard from Doctor Ierie that their nervous system was so shocked they were basically dead anyway? What kind of fucking death was that!

What the hell, he thinks, aiming for the sharp-edged, devouring pit in his chest. What the hell is this? Who could do this - how dare they do this?

En, Sukuna hums with a careless tone utterly belied by the sickening black rage that seethes in counterpoint to his own. There will always be such filth in this world.  

A sharp pain shoots through Yuuji's face, reminding him to unclench his teeth. Kugisaki is talking about how disgusting those methods are, and Fushiguro's face has a reluctant and dark cast to it. 

Your transfiguration skills, Yuuji thinks, grasping onto the idea with both hands and teeth. Could you fix it?

No, Sukuna answers bluntly. Or to put it another way - I can fix flesh, with a lot of time and effort. But that woman said something about their brain stems, which is not nearly as simple. Furthermore…

What else?

What else is hard to say without a sample to look at, she adds, somewhat reluctantly. I'd have to say that this is the work of a technique. Your teacher already showed you the gap between applications of cursed energy and a technique.  

Yuuji doesn't believe that Sukuna is lying - she won't work for free, but she isn't stubborn about payment either and her anger wasn't fake. If she hates it so much, she definitely wouldn't be trying to strike a hard bargain here. There's no point in playing up the difficulty of it. However-

You've seen this stuff before, Yuuji surmises. 

There's a faint but black sense of agreement. A strange sensation, like some kind of abyssal ocean turning over. They were experimenting with seals, Sukuna admits lightly, and I found their results to be an eyesore.  

Sukuna, he thinks, has a way of telling truths that sound like lies. Especially after that moment just a bit ago, when it felt like he and she were united under one terrible cause. 

And it was terrible.

Yuuji steeples his fingers and breathes through it until Nanami commits them to hunting the thing that dared commit such terrible crimes just to draw them out.

-0-

"Tch, he totally knows where it is," Kugisaki says in the car as they're on their way to find Yoshino Junpei. 

Yuuji blinks, turning to look at her. "What do you mean?" 

Rolling her eyes, she says, "You're kidding, right? That guy bitched a lot about how we're all children. A cursed spirit capable of doing… that to people, definitely isn't low in grade. Even if it takes five minutes to do, there must be some kind of paralysis aspect to its technique, so imagine fighting it. Face it, he's treating us like babies and sending us on a wild goose chase." 

Fushiguro looks exhausted but not like he disagrees. "We both have long distance attacks, but Itadori doesn't." 

Yuuji frowns. That's true, and he hasn't gotten a replacement cursed tool… he has the divergent fist that Gojo-sensei was helping him develop, but it's definitely not a long range attack. "Isn't facing it alone worse?"

"Y-you guys, try to relax and trust Nanami-san," Ijichi says, glancing up at them through the rearview mirror. "He's a grade one sorcerer, so it should be fine."

The three of them exchange looks. Yeah, they're all remembering the last time Ijichi took them on a mission that 'should be fine' huh. Well, what are they going to do about it? Fushiguro could probably use his shikigami to hunt Nanami down, but Yuuji doesn't see that turning out well. Nanami will just send them away again. He wilts, leaning forward to rest his head on the front seat. 

They get fairly lucky finding Yoshino, though. Skipping class again, so clearly he makes a habit of it. Yuuji did, too, once upon a time - he tried to shape up a little bit in recent years, mostly so his grandpa wouldn't pitch a fit and make his health worse. Grandpa didn't want him to have a record, so that's what Yuuji was trying to avoid - and maybe not joining the right clubs, but not being part of the 'going home' club. 

Honestly, Yuuji always figured he'd just go into construction and put his strength to use. He's really not the office worker type, and meeting Nanami just kind of hammers it home. Even Nanami can't cut it as a salary man! Well, ultimately becoming a Jujutsu sorcerer, even one with an expiration date, has neatly tied Yuuji's loose end, in a way. 

"Hey, what kind of guy do you think he is?" Yuuji asks. 

"What do you mean? The unruly kind that doesn't know what's good for them, obviously," Kugisaki says.

"But he isn't, not really," he points out. "Look, he's a bit gloomy, but he doesn't really look like a troublemaker."

The three of them stare at Yoshino to a point that it's probably surprising the guy hasn't gotten the creeps and started looking around for the eyes on him. 

"What does it matter?" Fushiguro asks after a moment. "Just release the flyheads on him." 

"It matters," Yuuji says. "We're trying to figure out if he's a bad guy, right? But he doesn't really look like a delinquent, even if he's skipping school." 

"He looks a bit like a loser, actually," Kugisaki says reluctantly. She sucks in a breath for a moment then rolls her eyes. "I mean, he just watched three people die, so that could be it."

"He was skipping that day, too, though."

"... a person that doesn't see the point in playing by the rules would skip for no reason," Fushiguro says at last, "or a person who is avoiding something unpleasant." 

Sometime later, when they try cornering Yoshino at his house, it's pretty obvious that the answer is 'avoiding something unpleasant' just by seeing that teacher interact with the guy. They were all too far away to hear what was said, but the vibes are seriously rancid. 

Yuuji got pretty lucky with his high school, but he also has had some super shitty teachers over the years. Between his hair color and his - uh, weird behavior back then, there had been a few teachers that decided to make him their 'pet project'; though 'bullying target' feels more accurate. 

Maybe he was being a little personal when he went running off with that guy's pants, but - eh. Shitty adults that only know how to throw their weight around bullying children should definitely get a taste of their own medicine every once in a while. 

Kugisaki holds up Yoshino until Yuuji circles back around. Kugisaki is effortlessly tearing into the teacher, and even though Yoshino seems a little intimidated, he's still listening. Yuuji gets it - Kugisaki can be a lot, especially if you're not someone like Yuuji, who has the physical advantage on everyone and so is rarely intimidated. 

Yuuji manages to lighten the atmosphere a little bit before Kugisaki decides to get on with it.

"Listen, we have some questions about whatever you might have seen at the theater," she says. "Don't play dumb, it's obvious you can see these guys." She jerks her thumb at the flyhead that Yuuji stuffed into his pocket. 

"Oh, um… but I didn't really see anything," Yoshino says. "Or not like that, anyway." 

Kugisaki hums, looking him up and down before jerking her head back up the road. "You mind waiting with us until our manager gets here?" she asks. "He might have some other questions to ask you." 

Yoshino glances between the two of them and seems to come to some sort of decision. "Alright. Um. Why don't we wait over here?" 

He points out a staircase not far from the way to his house. Kugisaki takes the opportunity to lean over and let Yuuji know that Fushiguro is helping Ijichi round up the other pests, while also giving him a meaningful look and a pointed head tilt toward Yoshino.

Ah. Either Kugisaki or Fushiguro noticed something about the kid while he was distracted. Well, admittedly, Yoshino's reaction to this whole thing has been weird. Not like - bad weird, and he doesn't think Yoshino has bad intentions, though? Well, time will tell, probably. 

It takes approximately zero minutes for Kugisaki and Yoshino to get into a prickly argument about gore films. Yuuji isn't sure why they're arguing, really, they seem to basically have the same low opinion of them? It's just that Kugisaki thinks the whole genre is a waste of time and Yoshino still wants to give them a chance.

He's looking for meaning in the macabre, Sukuna says abruptly. 

Yuuji stills, a little stunned. If not for her popping up to taunt Gojo-sensei and those kids from Kyoto, Yuuji would think that Sukuna is a complete shut-in. It's just that she's never offered commentary on things not about Jujutsu that he's a little surprised that she's taken an interest in this guy. 

Given Kugisaki's look earlier, that's… not good. Well, it's not entirely bad, either; at least she doesn't seem to think this kid is their transfigurer. Yuuji's not sure how fast people get a grasp on their techniques, which Sukuna seems to think this is, but Yoshino seems… kind of young, and not angry enough or cold enough. Then…? 

"Hey," Yuuji says, ignoring that he's interrupting Kugisaki and Yoshino's little spat, "have you seen 'Beneath the Surface'?" 

"Huh?"

Yoshino doesn't look any more clued in than Kugisaki. "What year was it made?" he asks anyway. 

"It's the 1980's thriller," Yuuji says. "About a school kid and a police officer."

Yoshino thinks about that for a second, then says, "oh, wasn't it the one where the kid was the killer?" 

"Yeah, and no one suspected it because Katsumi is a little timid and has good grades," Yuuji says. 

"I guess it's okay," Yoshino says. "It seemed a little unrealistic, though." 

Alright, then, umm - "Then that 90's film, Disrupted Connections?" 

It still takes Yoshino a while to dig up that one, although less than the previous. "That's the one about the demoted cop who went to a small town, but his coworker was basically working for the yakuza, right?" 

"Right!" Yuuji claps his hands together. "All along, the coworker seemed to be supporting the protagonist, but every time he'd spit out some platitudes about protecting the innocent or maintaining order, the next case would have the victim doing something scummy or breaking the law, but there'd be no evidence to use against them!" 

Kugisaki takes a few looks at him. "You can really notice something like that," she says in a tone of surprise. 

With a mournful expression, Yuuji says, "Sensei has me watching a lot of psychological thrillers." 

"No way," Yoshino says with an incredulous smile, "your teacher lets you watch movies?" 

"It's basically a boarding school," Kugisaki says, glancing at him. "We learn common sense stuff and mathematics and everything else, but since being a sorcerer is a lifelong commitment, schooling and accommodations afterwards are taken care of." 

"It doesn't exactly pay a lot, though." 

They all turn to see Fushiguro coming down the stairs toward them. His mouth still hasn't quite relaxed out of the tedious twist it takes when he's done something he finds redundant. Yoshino draws his attention the most, but that's just a wary, dark gaze. 

"After all, it's still ruled over by the clans," he adds. "They'd sooner die than give anyone else the chance to accumulate power - even if it's just through money." 

"Yeah, but how different is that from the normal world," Kugisaki snorts, glancing at Yoshino. "Our superior this time is a guy that tried to make a go of it in the real world. Didn't he still come running back? Even if it sucks, you still have to do what you're suited for." 

"What is it like, then? Being a - jujutsu sorcerer student?" Yoshino asks, looking a little curious. 

"It's dirty, dangerous, and disgusting!" Kugisaki says loudly. 

"They don't actually train you until high school," Fushiguro points out. "I went to a normal middle school before this, but I've known since I was a kid that I'd become a sorcerer. It's really dangerous. Most sorcerers die - no one wants to die, so you don't really get a choice about how you'll die, but…" 

"Everyone dies sooner or later," Yuuji says lightly. "I just want to help some people before I go." 

Kugisaki and Fushiguro both fall into an awkward silence, but Yoshino, having no clue what the situation was, simply takes it at face value.

"What about killing people," he asks, blinking. 

Yuuji sits back, thinking of those transfigured people earlier. Luckily Nanami realized something was wrong before they really did kill them, but - they pretty much died anyway. And it would have been a mercy, right? 

A strange pang goes through some unnamable part of him. It's almost distracting enough that he misses the look Kugisaki and Fushiguro exchange over their heads. 

Before any of them can figure out how to address that kind of question, Yoshino's mother spots them on her way back from the grocery store. From the initial cool way she greets them, a bit more of the situation comes clear - after all, it's the three of them crowded around Yoshino in what Yuuji belatedly realizes seem like old-school yankii uniforms. 

It's Yoshino, who fidgets a little and requests contact information that sets her mind at ease. They wave goodbye to mother and son, standing in place until the pair disappear from sight.

Notes:

Junpei, being groomed by a cursed spirit:
Yuuji: Oh!!! My teacher taught me all about getting groomed by cursed spirits!!!! :3

All those movies are fake, don't look for them.

Like a lot of people, I really jived with Nanami's "adults take care of children" thing. However, writing this fic requires more interrogation of the text and I'm like "uhh you're delusional, right?" His lecturing isn't at all reflected in Yuuji's reality, and then he dies and "leaves the rest to [Yuuji]" and i'm. Hmm.

Hey, it took me until this read to realize that Junpei was deliberately designed to be Yuuji's Tsumiki??? No wonder Sukuna bailed and later bitched about Yuuji's ideal of "being unbreakable", weak ass bitch.
But Junpei being Yuuji's Tsumiki also really hammered home what I felt already, which is that Kenjaku's plans are less "just as planned" and more "gambit roulette". Kenny is really out there slinging stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. "Oh, Kenjaku planned this for a thousand years and had so many contingency plans-" like fuck he did. The ones that succeeded did so by plot armor, nothing more, nothing less.

Notes:

This was saved as "WineAuntSukuna" in my files